What’s even more interesting for Wikipedia is that there are many specific types advisers with their own page, and many advisors with their own page. And some types of advisors redirect to advisers. And other types of advisers redirect to advisors. For example, “Financial advisor” redirects to “Financial adviser” and “Technical adviser” redirects to “Technical advisor”. This is despite the fact that “Financial advisor” is a much more prevalent phrase than “Financial adviser”, and “Technical adviser” is a more prevalent phrase than “Technical advisor”, as we’ll soon discover.

Both the standard dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Merriam-Webster, have links for advisor but show the main spelling as adviser. Interestingly, if you search directly at m-w.com, the o/e-neutral page for advise comes up, which seems to equally frustrate everyone (e.g. the comments).

Thesaurus.com show many more results for advisor. The first synonym listed is another victim of careless machine learning and is blazingly incorrect—adviser! Then, to make matters worse, the adviser page doesn’t show advisor as a synonym.

Tripadviser.com has a redirect to tripadvisor.com. And good thing for the redirect — there are still 10,400 Google results for tripadviser.com. (It’s common for large sites to buy domains of common spelling errors and typos, i.e. twittter.com). Here is an example of one Twitter user fighting for his/her semantic preference. Or maybe it was that pesky autocorrect, also guilty of forgetting the apostrophe in “cant”.

But let’s dig deeper and see what the data says.

(please visit the Code Section for further description & links to codes)

On Twitter, it’s not straightforward to count the number of tweets that are found with a search term. Doing so required some mini-mining with the Twitter API and a snippet of Python code. I downloaded tweets that have either advisor or adviser and then counted each separately. Going back in time one week, there were 50,165 times that the case-insensitive advisor was used, compared to 23,016 for adviser, corresponding to an o/e ratio of 2.2. Counting only instances of capitalized Advisor and Adviser, their counts were 25,383 and 7,825, respectively. With an increased o/e ratio of 3.2, the predominance of capitalized Advisor indicates a title or a role, as described above. By putting the tweets with public geo-location on the world map, with advisor in blue and adviser in red, nothing really stands out. But it’s sometimes fun to click and see what people around the world are saying about their advisors and their advisers?