Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
I’ve been shopping online for a chest of drawers and noticed that Gumtree and eBay turn up many options for ‘chest of draws’ instead. Today, Google showed examples from the UK, NZ, SA and Australia as well as Brooklyn and Providence RI. My theory is that these regional accents all use a softer ‘r’ sound than, making ‘draw’ and ‘drawer’ sound very much the same. I haven’t seen any examples from Ireland, where the ‘r’ sound is more pronounced.
Makes some sense eggcornwise if you imagine the action of drawing open the item concerned.
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Welcome to the Forum, hollyann.
There was a discussion of draw vs. drawer in 2008. The primary vector in that discussion was from Boston, and so probably shares Providence accent.
As was pointed out during that discussion, and as you point out, too, this seems to be variation based on regional pronunciations rather than a re-imagining of the semantics of drawer. That makes it quite interesting, but not (necessarily) an eggcorn.
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