Eggcorn Forum

This is a typical example of a potential eggcorn that leaves me skeptical. There are two reasons for this:

1. “Syphilis” is misspelled in numerous ways. Two “l”s or one? Where to put the “y” and how many of them are there anyway? So “sylphilis” will crop up occasionally, along with many others.
2. There are only about 11 genuine, English hits on Google, as of today. It doesn’t look as if this misspelling was more frequent than others.
3. “Sylph” is not precisely a very common word. My rule of thumb for eggcorns vs. malapropisms or simple slip-ups is to ask myself: “Is a complicated word being replaced with a simpler, more common one?” In the case at hand, both “syphilis” and “sylph” are specialized terms.

1. There might be phonetic reasons for the duplication of the l to occur in an unfamiliar, rarely used word.

   So yes, for people who know what a sylph is, the variant spelling is worth a chuckle. But were the “sylphilis” users actually aware of the sense of sylph?