Great words: Eggcorn

Thanks to Michael Quinion, one of my favorite word mavens, for introducing me to the term eggcorn, a "spell-as-you-speak error." Linguist Geoffrey Pullam coined the term based on the example of a woman who wrote egg corns when she meant acorns.

Michael explains the term In this week's World Wide Words newsletter in the course of answering a reader's question about the origin of the term centrifical force. His research reveals that the use of centrifical in lieu of centrifugal is a "surprisingly common" instance of an eggcorn. Other examples he cites are "supposably for supposedly, nucular for nuclear, and intrical when integral is meant." Read Michael's full explanation here .

I was so tickled by the picture of an eggcorn that I couldn't resist googling up a few more. The Language Log has many great examples of the phenomenon, among them

• antidotal evidence for anecdotal evidence (I suppose doctors prefer the former to the latter)
• empirical conquest for imperial conquest (Science seems to be a great source of eggcorns) and
• nip in the butt for nip in the bud (I'm not going there!)

My favorite find was Mark Liberman's post about eggcorns in the 1980 novel  Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban. The 12-year-old narrator of this post-apocalyptic tale speaks a brilliantly evocative language that, as I remember, required me to read the novel virtually aloud. Just to put the red cord strait, the literary pleasures of the novel offered more than ample comping station .

You can sample the novel's linguistic oddities and treasures at the Riddley Walker Annotation Site, devoted to a comprehensive and elaborate analysis of the novel. Eli Bishop started the site three years ago and has attracted a motley crew of collaborators. Together, they have been maintaining and expanding it ever since.

The site is becoming what used to be known as a concordance, or alphabetical index of every word in an important text. BC (Before Computers), only texts such as the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and similar cultural icons had concordances. I recall how impressed I was as a library school student to learn that such works existed.

I first read Riddley Walker shortly after it was published. At that time, a project like Bishop's, focused on a cult classic that few would include in the literary canon, was barely imaginable.  Today, there is a wide selection of powerful, inexpensive concordance software available -- a Google search of that phrase yielded 314,000 results -- and numerous collaborative concordance projects are underway around the internet.

[Note: This post was updated on 1/3/04 to correct my misspellings of Riddley Walker. Thanks, Eli,  for pointing out my error!]