The Mystery of the Missing 11th: An xkcd Comic Unravels a Digital Anomaly
2025-06-19
An xkcd comic sparked a question about the unusually low frequency of the '11th' of the month in Google's Ngrams database. The author confirmed this anomaly through data analysis, tracing the issue to OCR misinterpretations and printing technology. The numeral '1' closely resembles the letters 'I', 'l', and 'i', leading to frequent misreads of '11th' as 'IIth', 'Ilth', and even 'nth'. This was particularly prevalent in the typewriter era due to the lack of a dedicated '1' key. The discovery highlights the complexities of seemingly simple digital recognition and the impact of technological evolution on data analysis.
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