Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
There are 1,150 Google hits for “unlightly”, and in the first few pages it is mostly doing service for “unlikely” (there are 86 hits for “in the unlightly event” – which I suppose could be perceived by its users as an idiom that has nothing to do with “unlikely”). It’s morphologically legal, but any plausible readings of it (e.g., opposite of “lightly”) don’t t have any obvious connection with the semantic field of “unlikely”, so I don’t think it counts as an eggcorn. It’s hard to say (using Google) whether this is based on an analysis of “likely” as “lightly”. {“is lightly that” OR “seems lightly that”} turns up no hits.
I’m struck by the fact that four of the first twenty hits for “unlightly” are from Irish sites. The two are very similar in my own (Irish) pronunciation, though I wouldn’t have thought the two are phonetically any closer together in Irish English than they are in, say, British or US English.
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