diff --git a/MySQLdb/connections.py b/MySQLdb/connections.py
index 6d5f402..8375cd0 100644
--- a/MySQLdb/connections.py
+++ b/MySQLdb/connections.py
@@ -208,7 +208,7 @@ class Connection(_mysql.connection):
 
         self._server_version = tuple([ numeric_part(n) for n in self.get_server_info().split('.')[:2] ])
 
-        self.encoding = 'ascii'  # overriden in set_character_set()
+        self.encoding = 'ascii'  # overridden in set_character_set()
         db = proxy(self)
 
         # Note: string_literal() is called for bytes object on Python 3 (via bytes_literal)
diff --git a/doc/user_guide.rst b/doc/user_guide.rst
index 86a8b17..a0b752c 100644
--- a/doc/user_guide.rst
+++ b/doc/user_guide.rst
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ MySQLdb User's Guide
 Introduction
 ------------
 
-MySQLdb is an thread-compatible interface to the popular MySQL
+MySQLdb is a thread-compatible interface to the popular MySQL
 database server that provides the Python database API.
 
 Installation
diff --git a/tests/dbapi20.py b/tests/dbapi20.py
index 19109f4..e28d5d1 100644
--- a/tests/dbapi20.py
+++ b/tests/dbapi20.py
@@ -633,7 +633,7 @@ class DatabaseAPI20Test(unittest.TestCase):
                 cur.execute(sql)
 
             # cursor.fetchall should raise an Error if called
-            # after executing a a statement that cannot return rows
+            # after executing a statement that cannot return rows
             self.assertRaises(self.driver.Error,cur.fetchall)
 
             cur.execute('select name from %sbooze' % self.table_prefix)
diff --git a/tests/test_MySQLdb_dbapi20.py b/tests/test_MySQLdb_dbapi20.py
index 2274c45..88eaaef 100644
--- a/tests/test_MySQLdb_dbapi20.py
+++ b/tests/test_MySQLdb_dbapi20.py
@@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ class test_MySQLdb(dbapi20.DatabaseAPI20Test):
                 cur.execute(sql)
 
             # cursor.fetchall should raise an Error if called
-            # after executing a a statement that cannot return rows
+            # after executing a statement that cannot return rows
             #self.assertRaises(self.driver.Error,cur.fetchall)
 
             cur.execute('select name from %sbooze' % self.table_prefix)