A judge in India has ruled that a will worth £2.6bn was forged after noticing a number of spelling mistakes in  the document.

Earlier this month, the court in the city of Chandigarh, which is in the north of the country, decided that the will of former maharaja Harinder Singh Brar had been faked and that none of his belongings will be passed onto his workforce.

The case, which had been ongoing for 21 years, involved a selection of valuable assets. As well as a 350-year-old fort, the maharaja of Faridkot owned a private aerodrome and a number of stables.

While the will in question would’ve seen the properties left with a charitable trust set up by a number of Singh Brar’s servants and palace workers, one of his daughters, Amrit Kaur, immediately questioned the reliability of the document, from which her name had been omitted.

After a lengthy legal battle, Judge Rejneesh Kumar Sharma ruled in favour of the maharaja’s daughters. He claimed he was swayed by a number of factors, with spelling errors being particularly prominent.

As well as a number of informational inaccuracies, the judge pointed out that the word ‘holograph’ had been consistently spelt incorrectly as “harrograph”, and said that someone with the educational background of the maharaja would be highly unlikely to make such a glaring error.

While a spelling mistake on the average business website may not always have £2bn riding on it, basic errors can definitely affect the confidence of consumers. Studies have shown that internet users often base their opinions of a company on the quality of the text used on its social media pages and official web pages. It is for this reason that so many companies outsource the task of content creation to professional copywriters.

Graeme Parton

Graeme has experience creating content for online sources and for the radio, and at university he studied Multimedia Journalism.