Seriously, this just happened

[andrewducker]

My keyboard doesn't even have a theta on it. Nor do I have any idea which order the c and the i should go in.

Comments

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

No, that's not how it works. An automated system is passed the pages that have been scanned, and it performs recognition on those pages. Any words that it has a low confidence threshold on are automatically sent to Recaptcha so that they can be crowdsourced. The only point at which a human being will look at the word is if the crowdsourcing doesn't reach a consensus on what the word is (in this case, the word will almost certainly qualify).

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

And this means you don't have to get the scanned word completely right. If your guess is somewhere in the right ballpark with other people's guesses, you pass.