Spell Mississippi

As an editor I find the information below very interesting.I consult the Visual Thesaurus whenever I'm face to face with words I need to have more background knowledge about. So far, I have not been frustrated. When I subscribed to "Word for the Day" I got words such as what is featured below.

Here, I've learned a high-fallutin' way of saying, "Oops, wrong speling...er...spelling" Of course, I can't say this "word" to a writer lest I be thought of as somebody who is "a tad" arrogant. But It's good to know there's a word for this kind of spelling mistake.

“Search the Web for 'Missippi' and you'd find thousands of hits showing pages where the authors clearly meant "Mississippi." With the advent of modern computers and spell-checkers you'd think this illustration of haplography would not occur so often.

“If you feel this is bad, imagine the time before the printing press came along, when the only way to make copies of a book was with a quill and parchment. There were no photocopying machines to crank out double-sided copies.

“Biblical translations and copies of other books from olden times are replete with haplography and its cousins. Many scholars spend their lifetime identifying these 'bugs' in ancient books and other scripts.

“A counterpart of haplography is haplology. Haplology occurs when one 'eats' a few letters while pronouncing a word. Latin nutrix (nurse) came from an earlier word, nutritrix. Chancery, a contraction of chancellery, is now an acceptable part of the English language. Perhaps some day 'probly' will be considered standard and 'probably' obsolete!

“If there are some words that economize on letters, there are others which splurge. The word for this phenomenon is called dittography. "

“haplography (hap-LOG-ruh-fee) noun-- Accidental omission of a letter or letter group that should be repeated in writing, for example, "mispell" for misspell".
[From Greek haplo- (single) + -graphy (writing).]

Anu Garg, Visual Thesaurus

"In the apparatus of Trounce's edition, dittography occurs at line 266, haplography at line 352, and there are numerous erasures and Corrections within the text." Elaine Treharne; Romanticizing the Past in the Middle English Athelston; The Review of English Studies; Oxford University Press; Feb 1999."

The point here? Always find the right word, and correct spelling, and exact pronunciation using the Visual Thesaurus. Click link here under "I'm into this"