Misspelling "Prologue" for fun and profit · 10:49pm April 20th

I sometimes joke that I collect misspellings of the word "Prologue", because it so often gets misspelled on Fimfiction in delightfully unique ways.

But how many variant spellings are there? This is a question that we can answer with math, using something called Levenshtein distance, which measures the number of single-character edits it takes to turn one word into another word - or to put it another way, it tells you how "close" two words are. It's good for finding slight misspellings of a word, which is exactly what we need to explore Fimfiction's Prologue-space.

Hooves, how do they work

I searched all first chapters of all stories on Fimfiction, searching for variants of the word "Prologue" within a Levenshtein distance of 5. I added a couple of extra caveats to narrow it to words beginning with P and keeping the word within certain length limits. Then I narrowed it down manually, since there are lots of valid words within that distance, like "Plague", "Praline", and "Prolapse". Casing is ignored.

The result is the following list, which identifies "Prolouge" as the winning misspelling, followed by "Prologe" and "Prolougue". Not all of them are actually misspellings, but I kept them in because they're fun.

Prologue: 12787 usages
Prolouge: 482 usages
Prolog: 118 usages (Apparently this is an accepted variant spelling.)
Prologe: 41 usages
Prolougue: 18 usages
proluge: 12 usages
Prolgue: 10 usages
Prologus: 7 usages (Latin translation.)
Prologues: 7 usages (For when one prologue isn't cutting it.)
Prolugue: 6 usages
Pro-Log: 6 usages (A kind of real-time temperature monitoring system.)
Prologo: 4 usages (Italian, apparently.)
Pologue: 3 usages
Prolauge: 3 usages (I mean, if you're not sure which vowels to use, might as well use all of them)
Prolegomena: 2 usages (Plural of "prolegomenon", a type of prologue used in academic works.)
Prolouqe: 2 usages (Someone's OCR software failed.)
PrØlÓgué: 1 usage (Someone's OCR software really failed.)
Purrlogue: 1 usage (If the description is accurate, this story predicted the introduction of Capper and the Abyssinians five years ahead of time.)
Prologos: 1 usage
Protologue: 1 usage (Term used in taxonomy.)
Prolgoue: 1 usage
Prolague: 1 usage
Paralogue: 1 usage (A pair of genes that derive from the same ancestral gene.)
Pro-prologue: 1 usage (Not sure that's how that prefix works.)
Prolougi: 1 usage
Pre-prologue: 1 usage
prologue-ish: 1 usage (I love the uncertainty.)
Protolog: 1 usage
Pronlog: 1 usage (Well, it is Fimfiction.)
Prodaloge: 1 usage (Oh come on. You're just not trying.)
Prouloge: 1 usage
Prologua: 1 usage
Prolodge: 1 usage
prolongue: 1 usage
Prolonge: 1 usage (This is the one that got me curious enough to do this analysis.)
Proglue: 1 usage (I'm more of a velcro-anarchist myself.)
Proglogue: 1 usage (halp am drowning)
Prolouges: 1 usage
Protolgue: 1 usage
PROLOGUE.TXT: 1 usage (From a cyberpunk story.)
Protologe: 1 usage
prologue.lua: 1 usage (From a fic that combines MLP, Garry's Mod, and the Lua scripting language. Yes, really.)
Prólogue: 1 usage (Spanish?)
Prólogo: 1 usage (Spanish.)