Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
The Eggcorn Forum and the Eggcorn Database are currently in the process of being converted into static sites.
Once the conversion is complete, all existing posts are expected to still be accessible at their original URLs. However, no new posts will be possible.
Feel free to comment on the relevant forum threads.
Chris -- 2025-05-10
This one seems so common that I couldn’t believe it hadn’t been covered already on this site. I first heard of it from a professor of mine, who told me that she received papers from college students with this eggcorn. A Google search for the former (“firstable”) yields 13,400 results, while a search for the latter (“firstible”) yields 648 results, and a suggestion from Google that I may have meant: “firstable.”
This seems to be a word that is still recognized as incorrect by most people, and is mainly used by non-native English speakers unfamiliar with the phrase “first of all.” This is compounded by the dubious construction “second of all,” which suggests to the casual listener that ”-able” is an ordinal suffix.
I have not yet seen any instances of this term in print; most of the use of this word seems to be confined to blogs and discussion boards.
Offline