Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
My 3yo daughter has always called Trampolines “Jumpolines” – on the grounds, I expect, that you don’t tramp on a trampoline, you jump on it.
It seems to be in reasonably common usage – there are 64,500 Google results for a search on jumpoline..
Stuart
Offline
Your daughter may well have come up with this independently—it makes sense. But I looked at some of those Google hits, and “Jumpoline” appears to be a model name for a small kids’ trampoline made by a German (?) company. It’s hard to tell which way the influence is going: the commercial name may have been influenced by a popular reshaping, or the apparent reshaping may just be the result of people repeating the name on the box.
Offline
I looked at the results in a bit more detail:
Restricted to UK sites using google.co.uk and there are only 10 hits. At least 3 appear to be instances of children who have independently come up with this word, and as the German product isn’t on sale here I doubt very much they have been influenced by it!
Offline
“Jumpoline” certainly sounds like an eggcorn of “trampoline” to me, but I’m not sure what it would take for something like this to find its way into the Eggcorn Database… It seems that “jumpoline” is most prevalent among children, so it’s probably less documented in written form. Most of the eggcorns in the Database seem to have tens of thousands of independent citings. Even so, I don’t think that hurdle makes any judgment about the legitimacy of an eggcorn. In my opinion, “jumpoline” is a pretty darn cute example of one.
Offline
A little more checking shows that there’s an American company—Intex—that makes apparently the same product but calls it a “Jump-o-lene.” Here in the US, the Intex Jumpolene is available from all large retail outlets that sell toys—Walmart, Amazon, etc. From what I can tell, the huge majority of the people talking about jumpolenes or jumpolines on the Web are adults (they’re generally selling them), and they really are talking about Jumpolenes rather than trampolines more generally.
The toy seems to be harder to obtain in the UK, but “jumpolene” gets 322 hits on google.co.uk, and Amazon.co.uk sells at least one Jumpolene product (there’s a whole line of them now). So the possibility of commercial influence definitely exists even for British kids. And the Jumpolene is recommended for children 3-6 years of age—pretty much the age range of the kids who seem to be coming up with this as a synonym.
I think it’s possible that some children really have spontaneously coined this, and perhaps the product itself is named after a child’s reshaping of “trampoline.” But I’d be willing to bet that some of the children are calling trampoline-type things “Jumpolenes” because they’ve heard the adults at their preschool or daycare call them that; parents aren’t aware of the brandname, and assume that their children came up with the name independently.
Manufacturers like eggcornish names for products—“jumpolene” inevitably evokes “trampoline,” so the consumer will instantly know what you’re talking about. And “jumpolene” is cute and catchy and has the advantage of being “trademarkable.” But such names are a problem for us eggcorn hunters—once you discover that an apparent eggcorn is also the name of a widely available product, it’s really hard to be sure that any given instance of the word is truly an eggcorn.
Offline