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Now, when I first saw this, I hypothesized that the number of mistakes would go down roughly with edit distance. Not exactly true, see for yourself:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ao73DTH98IRgdC1...

I used a perl module (http://search.cpan.org/dist/Text-Levenshtein/Levenshtein.pm) to calculate the edit distances.

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Many of the differences aren't typoes (classified by edit distance) but sound-alikes.

Updated the document with a column giving the Soundex code (http://perldoc.perl.org/Text/Soundex.html) for just the first name (since last names are all the same. For the 593 entries, there are only 296 unique Soundex codes.

EDIT: BTW, the original form of the name is Brittany, so the top misspelling technically is not. This is one of the cases, like babe converting to baby where the misspelled and/or affectionate form became dominant.

theoretically one could account for this as edit distance in phoneme space...

Know off-hand why "britnay" and "briteny" come up as edit distance 6? Compare "britanny" at 2.

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