Contribute!
It would be particularly satisfying if The Eggcorn Database became, little by little, a collaborative tool.
There are several ways for you to help improve or support it, to contribute your knowledge, insight, discoveries or resources:
- Drop off your eggcorns in the Eggcorn Forum. You have captured an eggcorn in the wild? Excellent! Mind you, check that it is the right species of animal. Ask yourself whether the non-standard spelling that caught your attention indicates a reinterpretation of the meaning of (part of) the original expression. If so, in the database it goes. But if you are unsure, the forum is the right place to discuss whether your find is an eggcorn or not. The posts referenced on the About page might also be helpful.
- Commentaries on individual entries are, of course, welcome. Unlike the forum, however, the comment area is not a discussion space: It is a place to add data to an existing entry. If you wish to post whimsical observations or questions, or something that is not closely related to a particular entry, please do so in the Eggcorn Forum.
If you are committed to the eggcorn quest and have a taste for adventure, you can register and post draft entries of your own. These will be found and edited by the more experienced contributors. Eventually your submission will appear under your name. Once you have shown that you produce high-quality entries, we will give you full poster status.
Posting directly into the database is not quite as simple as leaving a comment or participating on the forum. The posting back-end is not particularly user-friendly and still needs a lot of work. I consider this project as work in progress (thus the “alpha” version label on the main page), and will add features and improvements as I figure out the needs and get more familiar with coding in PHP. If you wish to familiarize yourself with the process, you can read the Posting HOWTO.
If you appreciate this site and the effort that has gone into creating and maintaining it, a supportive e-mail to eggcorns@lascribe.net is always welcome. Or, in case you can spare a dollar (pound, euro) or two towards hosting fees and bandwidth, I will gratefully accept a donation. The Eggcorn Database is a purely personal endeavor and is not supported by any institution or commercial entity whatsoever.
Happy eggcorn-hunting,
Chris Waigl
(eggcorns@lascribe.net)
**NEW, 2005/10/25!** Changes are afoot at the Eggcorn Database. There is now a forum, with its own space for your contributions and submissions.
While I upgrade the software and work out some problems with the server, I have disabled commenting on the static pages, i.e. those that aren’t part of the eggcorn collection. The existing comments will reappear as soon as I have worked out a persistent bug with the comment display. This page has over 700 comments — some part of the code is choking on them at the moment.
Furthermore, I have disabled direct posting access to the Eggcorn Database for newly registered users. Several of us — Arnold Zwicky, Ben Zimmer, and several occasional contributors in addition to myself — have converged to what could be called a minimum standard of quality for entries. Our own early posts haven’t always conformed to it, and I have edited and improved quite a number of them. More importantly, we seem to agree reasonably well on what exactly an eggcorn is, and what kind of common word substitutions and lexical errors aren’t really of the type we are looking for. The new forum should make it easier to further refine the definition and to bring new posters up to speed.
210
Commentary by Ken Lakritz , 2005/03/19 at 10:30 pm
‘interstate’ for ‘intestate.’ 1,000+ google hits, a surprising number of which are formal legal documents. Some especially eggcornish cases in which someone dies far from home, between two states, hence ‘interstate.’ See, e.g.,
Interstate or overseas residents who died while visiting the NT and Northern Territory residents who died interstate were not included in the total. …
www.nt.gov.au/health/heal…
… I happen to have managed a particular account for a Resident Foreigner, here in the United Kingdom, who accidentally died Interstate…
www.ecademy.com/node.php?…
Real Estate Glossary
… Administrator - A person appointed by court to administer the estate of a deceased person who left no will; ie, who died interstate. …
www.ventura-county-reloca… re_library/glossary.htm
209
Commentary by Ken Lakritz , 2005/03/19 at 10:11 pm
‘edge your bets’ for ‘hedge your bets.’ The eggcorn appears on google about 1% as often as the original. Is the idea that you diminish the risk of a bet by placing an edge around it?
Do you prefer to edge your bets by dating a number of different men or are you waiting around for Mr Right? …
www.handbag.com/relations…
And, we all know, luck seldom stays around for long unless you edge your bets …
www.lasmag.com/~heraldgu/ editorial/april04/primetime.htm
The whole idea of a firewall is to edge your bets.
www.geocrawler.com/archiv…
208
Commentary by Ken Lakritz , 2005/03/19 at 9:46 pm
‘dissonant’ for ‘dissident.’ Protestors are like people who sing in the wrong key. Examples-
One of the most moving accounts I have ever read of this experience
came from a political dissonant imprisoned in a concentration camp …
www.lesliekenton.com/acti… movewithleslie/onmovearchive/lesliekentonmoveaug2.htm
Glad to know something grows in Siberia besides the political dissonant population.
www.geocities.com/livefro…
We would appear to have another example in Stalin’s treatment of
political dissonants as Russia’s primary scapegoats.
www.politicsofhealth.org/… view/full/104?eZSESSIDpoh=fa2bfa72a6d2248484b5ff2274eb9b29
… a tribalist defense mechanism that moves quickly to dismiss its dissonants as barbarians …
chud.com/forums/archive/i…
207
Commentary by Ken Lakritz , 2005/03/19 at 9:31 pm
‘reversatrol’ for ‘resveratrol.’ In 2003, a group from Harvard Medical School published a report in Nature, claiming that resveratrol, a compound in red wine, could slow or even reverse the aging process. From that moment, it was inevitable that people would start calling it ‘reversatrol.’ See, e.g.,
… Truth in Wine is a quarterly publication devoted to reporting levels of calories,reversatrol, sulfites, carhobydrates, polyphenols, flavonoids…
www.gastrocorner.dk/portal/portal.asp?folder=5
… Prof Bertelli tested reversatrol on human neural cells in laboratory cultures and discovered that it caused them to grow small extensions …
icteesside.icnetwork.co.u… enterprisenews/contentobjectid=13183492method=full_s…
… These compounds include the red-blue anthocyanin pigments, tannins and flavonoids such as reversatrol, ipicatechin and quercetin. …
cats.med.uvm.edu/catstea… familypractice/modules/nutrition/alcohol/alcohol.html
206
Commentary by Robin Frousheger , 2005/03/19 at 8:33 am
Intact >> In Tacked
My neigbour’s daughter received a note from her teacher that said: “Each child is expected to bring an in tacked egg for painting at Easter.”
205
Commentary by Ken Lakritz , 2005/03/19 at 3:25 am
‘conclusive’ for ‘conducive.’ A common substitution on google. See, e.g.,
… The hotel does have a free shuttle service, but the time to return to the hotel was not conclusive to the Downtown experience we wanted. …
www.mytravelguide.com/hot… reviews-16240101-HiltonChicagoreviews.html
…the approach is reasonable and the staffing and time estimates are conclusive to a successful result …
www.mcdonnell-phillips.co…
… “Overall I was very pleased with the content and pace of the course. Generally I found the atmosphere to be very conclusive to learning. …
www.logisticseducation.co…
The home itself was built for family living and the surrounds
are conclusive to peace and quiet.
www.domain.com.au/Public/… aspx?adid=2004674605&n=
204
Commentary by Ken Lakritz , 2005/03/19 at 2:50 am
‘amiable’ for ‘amenable.’ There’s a weak overlap in meaning here; the amiable are more apt to be amenable. See, e.g.,
He seemed amiable to this suggestion and signed an agreement for
our project. …They, too, were amiable to this request. …
www.asl.neu.edu/tiem.onli… mmcurriculumappendixC.html
It forces you to write code that is clean, concise and amiable to change. …
www.cs.brown.edu/~kit/tak…
Really! I have found top CEO’s to far more approachable and amiable
to discussion than mid-level managers.
www.expertclick.com/NewsR… default.cfm?Action=ReleaseDetail&ID=8235
As a consequence (sub-)mesoscale eddies with weakly stratified
cores are generated, amiable to both stretching and mixing. …
www.nersc.no/~torel/AGUposter_orig.pdf
203
Commentary by Ken Lakritz , 2005/03/19 at 1:50 am
‘all tolled’ for ‘all told.’ You’ve taken everything into acount when all the chimes have been heard from. About 5,000 google refs. e.g.,
… All tolled, NASA plans to launch the Atlantis flight and eight other complicated station-construction missions by the end of 2001 …
www.space.com/news/spaces… launchwindow000829.html
All tolled, today, the world is consuming a little over 80 mbd (30 billion barrels per year).
www.thirdworldtraveler.co… Oilwatch/OilDependence_Military.html
… All tolled, these increases would come to about $6.5 billion — a modest investment compared to the $900 billion (retroactive) tax cut…
www.aaup.org/govrel/fedbu…
202
Commentary by Nigel Pond , 2005/03/18 at 4:30 pm
Re 185: Linda you are right - the stops are organ stops, so by pulling out all the stops the organ is playing as loud as it can.
201
Commentary by Ian Pollock , 2005/03/18 at 1:42 am
I ran into this rather odd gem on my favourite art website, deviantart.com. Somebody titled their photograph “disaperation”, and from the nature of the picture, it seems to mean “desperation”. Apparently the first three letters, “des”, have been reinterpreted to mean the suffix “dis-” plus “aperation” - origin unclear. What seems oddest to me is that this new word effectively has five syllables, versus the four of “desperation,” but I imagine the producer of “disaperation” assumed that there was a schwa sound between “s” and “p” that is simply reduced in speech.
Source: www.deviantart.com/deviat…