diff --git a/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py b/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py
index 4a9610355a..4e2a74624d 100755
--- a/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py
+++ b/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py
@@ -232,7 +232,7 @@ def __init__(self, params=None):
             # On Python 3, the Unicode filesystem API will throw errors (#1474)
             self.report_warning(
                 'Assuming --restrict-filenames since file system encoding '
-                'cannot encode all charactes. '
+                'cannot encode all characters. '
                 'Set the LC_ALL environment variable to fix this.')
             self.params['restrictfilenames'] = True