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
When I first ran into it, it took me a while to understand that legrooms was being used to refer to the space your legs inhabit while you drive or fly. While your head is in the head room. I think this is an eggcornish rethinking of the word “room”, from an attribute to a compartment.
Indian travel blog
These low-cost airliners have such crappy legrooms, it is impossible to change your sitting style without suffering hip dislocation.
Singapore Bus service
We offer luxurious coaches with reclining seats, large legrooms, spacious luggage compartments all suitable for VIP transfers or ferrying of tourists.
Travel blog
The other two passengers sitting next to me were a Bengali lady and her teenager son and I had a hard time trying to enter my window seat using the tiny legroom in front of them.
Offline
The third example is the most convincing to me because it is singular. The other two would be standard usage if one simply removed the -s, so it’s possible that they might be spurious pluralizations that happened because the writer wanted to apply the property of having either crappy or large amounts of legroom to a multitude of seats.
The best analogy I can come up with for what I’m thinking of is someone saying that an establishment provided several people with “room and boards.” It might be that the speaker fully understood that “board” in this context refers to meals and not to wooden planks, but made the mistake of thinking of the set phrase “room and board” as a single entity that could be pluralized to replace the word “rooms”. E.g. “The company provided all of them with rooms.”—> “The company provided all of them with room and boards.”
Offline
I think there’s definitely a reinterpretation of leg room, which uses continuous quantifiers, into a discretely-quantizeable “legroom”. (I apologize, I am more familiar with the vocabulary of physics than of grammar & linguistics, but I think maybe the meaning is clear enough.)
Given the provenance of the three examples, could this possibly be standard usage somewhere in the Indian subcontinent?
Offline