told » tolled
Spotted in the wild:
- All tolled, the Republican administrations from Lincoln to Garfield gave their railroad buddies 155,504,994 acres (more area than Texas), until Democrat Grover Cleveland declared still-unclaimed portions open to settlement in 1887. (Bits of News, Sep 3, 2007)
- No, not Scheme! Please, anything but Scheme! Oh, the memories, the horror, the untolled misery and death it left in its wake! (Slacker Central forum, April 3, 2002)
- “Even if we get a killing frost, it wouldn’t change yields too much on our main grain crops,” he said Thursday afternoon. “All tolled, it won’t have much of an economic impact, not that it won’t cut down yield on the late planted crops, but there weren’t very many acres of that this year.” (Guardian Unlimited, Reader film review, Oct 22, 2003)
- And also worth seeing for Johnny Depp’s comical antics. Good, silly fun. And, all tolled, much better than time spent in a Soviet-era holding cell. (Guardian Unlimited, Reader comment, Nov 22, 2006)
- If you don’t believe the West’s possession of nukes didn’t save untolled lives during the Soviet era, you are ignoring reality, which is no unique event herein. ()
Analyzed or reported by:
- Paul Brians (Common Errors in English)
It is hard to credit anyone for this eggcorn. The _all tolled_ version has been suggested twice on this very site, by Bill Bevis and Ken Lakritz, and is, as noted above, also in Brians. Jan Freeman used it as an example in her Eggcorn-themed column _Wanton Eggcorns_ in the Boston Globe on April 8, 2007.
Quite a number of people are convinced the _tolled_ version is the correct one and defend it, because it makes more sense to them:
* _It’s “all tolled” as in tallied, not “all told”
/english nazi_ (link)
* _untold instead of untolled when referring to numbers. “untold numbers of civilians were killed.” i hate that._ (link)
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