Eggcorn Forum

The word “comptroller” is employed in a variety of job titles. As a stand-alone term it often denotes the head of a firm’s accounting department.

I’ve heard “comptroller” pronounced both with and without the medial “p.” I’ve also heard it pronounced as “controller.” Interestingly, the word was originally “controller,” as we can see from the French.“contrôleur.” In Middle English the term was some version of “contre-roller,” a person who kept a copy of a roll that checked other rolls. By the sixteenth century the word for the office had been shortened from “contreroller” to “controller.”

So where did the “p” slip in? Etymologists speculate that people tended to see the word “count” in “controller,” since controllers worked with figures and accounts. “Count” comes from the Latin “computare” and it was often spelled “compt” in English (cf. the French cognate “compter”). The word “compt-roller,” then, is really “count-roller,” and thus an eggcorn for “cont(er)roller.”

“Count” ceased to be spelled as “compt” in the eighteenth century, making “comptroller” a frozen eggcorn: it is unlikely that those who use “comptroller” today intend the semantic transformations that made it an eggcorn. The modernized misspelling of “comptroller/controller” as “countroller,” however, remains an active eggcorn, occurring on thousands of web pages. It is used (1) as a replacement for “comptroller” and (2) as a replacement of the word for an electronic controller, especially in contexts where using a controller makes a nod to counting or numeric processing.

Examples:

Corporation annual report: “In 1994, he was promoted and posted to the Sealink group of companies, consortium related to the Bumi Armada Group involved in timber shipping and property development as the financial countroller.”

A prelim study sheet on the history of India: “Who among the following was appointed as the countroller of the Grain Market by Alauddin Khalji during the implementation of market control measure ?”

Review of a hotel: “The joker then came around and did nothing again, just spent sometime in the room and messed around with the temp countroller, which was set on 20c but would turn off after 25c.”

Automobile forum: “Little later I was switching between the different delivery levels for the AC/heater and nothing. Then when I turn the temp countroller for the AC two notches above the coldest setting it stops.”

Last edited by kem (2009-11-22 00:22:29)