# Is it “LessWrong” or “Less Wrong”?

You see both spellings in reference to the site and its community.
This is true in the community's gathering spots and on the wider Internet.
Which spelling is more prevalent?
Which came first?
I have tried to answer these questions.

Note that while "LessWrong" is unambiguously a name (unless a typo), the phrase "less wrong" may be used literally.
In some search systems, "LessWrong" matches URLs containing "lesswrong.com".
One needs to consider this when etimating use.


## Contents


## The front page

As of mid-2021, the `<title>` tag on the front page says "LessWrong".
The [very first archived copy](https://web.archive.org/web/20090615000000*/https://www.lesswrong.com/) of the front page[^1], however, has "Less Wrong" in the title.
To see how this changed happened, I downloaded one Wayback Machine snapshot of the front page for every year between 2009 and 2021 on the date closest to June 20th, converted it to text, and grepped it for mentions of "LessWrong" and "Less Wrong".
I then manually counted the results to make sure they were in user-visible text or image [alt text](!W "Alt attribute").
I did it with the shell script in the next subsection.
The extracted text was incomplete for the JavaScript-heavy LW 2.0.
I also looked at the HTML documents' source code.

[^1]: Not literally the first thing archived on this domain. The most surprising thing Except when it was a completely unrelated [personal website](https://web.archive.org/web/20050203180848/http://lesswrong.com/grenadine/) in 2004--2005.

### Code

```sh
#! /bin/sh

set -e

for year in $(seq 2009 2021); do
    if ! [ -f "$year.html" ]; then
        echo "Downloading front page for $year"
        curl --fail --location \
            "https://web.archive.org/web/${year}0620120000/http://lesswrong.com/" \
            > "$year.html"
    fi
done

for year in $(seq 2009 2021); do
    echo "=== $year"
    for regexp in 'lesswrong[^.]' 'less wrong'; do
        echo "== $regexp"

        w3m \
            -dump \
            -o display_charset=UTF-8 \
            "$year.html" \
            > "$year.txt"
        grep \
            --ignore-case \
            --perl-regexp \
            "$regexp" \
            "$year.txt" \
            || true
    done
done
```

### Matches

| Year | "LessWrong" | "Less Wrong" |
|------|-------------|--------------|
| 2009 | 4 | 8 |
| 2010 | 5 | 9 |
| 2011 | 0 | 6 |
| 2012 | 0 | 6 |
| 2013 | 0 | 8 |
| 2014 | 0 | 9 |
| 2015 | 0 | 9 |
| 2016 | 0 | 10 |
| 2017 | 2 | 6 |
| 2018 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 1 | 0 |
| 2021 | 6 | 0 |


## Search engine results

Searching LW and SSC for both phrases with Google finds the following:

| Query | Result count |
|-------|--------------|
| site:lesswrong.com "LessWrong" | 67700 |
| site:lesswrong.com "Less Wrong" | 116000 |
| site:slatestarcodex.com "LessWrong" | 632 |
| site:slatestarcodex.com "Less Wrong" | 1290 |


## Other places

Wikipedia [prefers](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LessWrong&oldid=1024112777) "LessWrong" and has preferred this spelling since the [creation of the wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=LessWrong&oldid=360160537) in 2010.


## Conclusion

In the early years (2009--2010), the front page of LW used "Less Wrong" in its user interface---with exception of the alt text on the logo, which said "Lesswrong Logo".
User submissions on the front page were inconsistent.
In 2010 or 2011, the front page changed the logo alt text to "Less Wrong".
With the release of LW 2.0 in 2018, "LessWrong" became standard.
"Less Wrong" is the original spelling and may be historically more common.
The site's current title is "LessWrong".

## Page metadata

URL: <https://dbohdan.com/lw-spelling.md>

Published 2021-06-20, updated 2021-07-23.

Tags:

- essay
- history
- natural language
- rationality