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
I just stumbled on this one for the first time: “I think this may well have warped her perception leading her to indulge in make-belief.” (from a judge’s ruling). Googling yields a little over 72,000 hits for “make-belief”, compared to 4,833,000 for “make-believe”, which is the version I’ve always heard and used. Since the quote was from a British judge, it’s possible that “make-belief” is a Brit version of the saying. I don’t think it qualifies as an eggcorn, as the only difference is a change of one of the words from verb to noun (“believe” to “belief”).
Dixon
Offline
Dixon, I suspect British judges might be a little peefed if not downright aggriefed at your suggestion. Seriously though, there are only 788 ‘unique’ ghits for ‘make belief’, and I was surprised to find that two online dictionaries, including MW, have ‘make-belief’ as a legitimate variant of ‘make-believe’.
Peter
Offline
Peter Forster wrote:
...I suspect British judges might be a little peefed if not downright aggriefed at your suggestion…
Aaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahaaaaaa!!!!
...there are only 788 ‘unique’ ghits for ‘make belief’...
Pardon my ignorance, but I’m a techneanderthal, so please educate me as to how one can determine the number of unique ghits without laboriously counting through page after page after page of hits (I assume you didn’t do it that way).
Dixon
Offline
Oh yes I did – you’re not the only techneanderthal around here – but I take the precaution of clicking ‘advanced search’ on the right of the panel you write in and choosing ‘100 results per page’. Then a few clicks of the highest number bottom right tends to drag numbers down to more realistic levels. We call ughits ‘unique’ but there are often still many duplicated entries but I pretend I don’t know that as I’ve no idea how to sieve them out. We tend to go for the uniques as the raw hits can be completely misleading. Pat and kem once had long exchange on this subject but lost me after the first few paragraphs, as they often do, but it might be worth searching out…
Peter
Offline
Peter’s system for getting “unique” hits is probably the simplest. I often just page to the end of the results if there aren’t a lot of them. If the numbers are big, I add “&start=950” (without the quotations) to the url that came up when I did the original query, and then hit enter.
In that long, tedious (and ominously unfinished) debate Kem and I had, we put forward very different opinions on what the unique hits number means.
Kem thinks it’s a ratio of hits per 1000 that are “unique.” I just got 72900 raw hits for “make belief” and 782 unique hits. Kem would say that means there are an estimated 56,935 (.782X72,900) unique hits out there.
For small numbers, I think that the unique hits number is a de facto count of the unique hits—what you see is what you get. When you get much more than about 7000 raw hits, I think the unique hits number is pretty much useless for our purposes. “Make belief” is one of those instances—I don’t think the 782 reading is meaningful for us.
Kem and I consider each other dead wrong on this issue.
Offline
Kem and I consider each other dead wrong on this issue.
A Southern Baptist fellow I knew in graduate school used to say to me “We’re all doing the Lord’s will, Kem, you in your way and I in His.”
One thing Pat and I do agree on, I believe, is that Google did not develop its reporting mechanism with the needs of this forum in mind.
Peter, when Google reports 788 “unique hits,” that is only 788 unique hits out of the thousand that Google is willing to show you (http://code.google.com/apis/searchappli … ilter_auto). In other words, the “uniquing” mechanism threw out about a quarter of the pages it found with the term “make belief.” Google believes that the phrase occurs on many more than a thousand pages, of course, but we don’t know exactly how many. The 72,900 hits it reports in the upper right of the reporting page are just an estimate, based on an algorithm that Google is unwilling to release to the public. And even if Google had given us an exact count, we still would not know the number of Internet pages with the relevant phrase, since there are significant portions of the Internet that are not represented in Google’s database.
Last edited by kem (2008-12-30 12:40:07)
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline