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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
caricature: 1748, from Fr. caricature, from It. caricatura “satirical picture,” lit. “an overloading,” from caricare “to load, exaggerate,” from V.L. carricare (see charge).
Plenty of ghits for charicature and characture, I think confusing the word as being related to or a form of character, which has a different root. Easy to see why the imagery substitution is being made.
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Eggcellent! A mistake I have probably made myself (not in print, I hope).
I haven’t seen caricature/char(i/a)cature on lists of commonly misspelled English words. It should be included. Google estimates that a hundred thousand web pages have this misspelling.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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