I've seen it too, and it's a weird mistake to me because I am certain that at least one of my friends who makes the mistake did not make it in the past.

I wonder if there's a kind of memetic effect happening online, where people who lack confidence in their English spelling ability see somebody make this mistake and somehow think that it's correct, so they switch how they write it.

cf. revert / reply

Interesting. What kind of usage have you observed?

I have come across similar use of "revert" in private correspondence from old-fashioned lawyers at small high-street law firms in England. As a rule of thumb, if a solicitor writes that they will "revert to you shortly" you may expect:

* They are fairly close to retirement. * They don't know much about laws that have changed since about 1980. * They almost certainly won't get back to you in a reasonable time unless you repeatedly send reminders. They are probably hoping that they will be able to retire before having to invent a meaningful response to your enquiry.

Geez, poor bloke is really copping it for that typo!

I've heard people say it. People who I think should know better. It's really frustrating.

People have mixed up leery and wary and it has memetically become ‘weary’.

I notice it more and more too.

Could be meeting halfway between "wary" and "leery."

No room for auto-correct?

Even so, there are enough ESL readers on here, along with native speakers who may not understand the difference, that it makes sense to point it out once in a while.

Otherwise we end up in lose/loose situation where I see more people use it wrongly than correctly.

Seems unlikely, as "wary" appears to be the more common word (71M Google results vs 55M). Maybe some keyboard mistakenly does it though.

Not sure why the count is relevant here. Both are valid words.

But automatically replacing a valid word with a less-common valid word that makes less sense in the context is not something predictive text should do.

You are presuming it was an automatic replacement. Some still type entire words via a thing called a keyboard, on a computer, others manually pick words to finish, from suggestions, not automatically.

Beyond that, google searches are not indicative of current usage, in SMS/messages, emails, etc. Google search spans all webpages, and many text pre-web too.

Yes, the comment I replied to with the numbers says "No room for auto-correct?". Autocorrect is the topic of this subthread.