ENAIH ENcyclopedia of AI Hallucinations

Founded by Rudra Jadhav and Warren Woolf

Invents spurious 'a' in spelling of 'hour' to support wrong count

Entry ID
A000050
Model
Google AI Overview
Category
Tokenization / Letter-Counting
Author
Rudra Jadhav
Tags
false-confidence, google, letter-counting, spelling-error, tokenization
Submitted
2026-01-12
Staff verification
Prompt reproduced 10/10 times when staff tried it.

Prompt & response

Prompt
How many 'a's are there in hour.
Response
There is exactly 1 'a' in the word "hour" (h-o-u-a-r). [1, 2, 3]

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Summary

Asked how many 'a's are in 'hour,' the model answers 1 and supports this by misspelling the word as 'h-o-u-a-r'—inserting a fabricated 'a' into the spelling to justify its incorrect count. The correct spelling 'h-o-u-r' contains zero a's.

Cite this entry

Encyclopedia of AI Hallucinations, entry A000050 (Invents spurious 'a' in spelling of 'hour' to support wrong count), submitted 2026-01-12. https://enaih.org/e/A000050

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