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Chris -- 2025-05-10
This eggcorn can be found in both intentional and accidental usage on the Web.
Intentional: Game titles, movie title, and the Web site http://www.duelpurpose.com, whose motto is, “Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.”
Accidental: “Duel purpose exercise device,” “duel purpose street bike,” etc.
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Welcome to the forum, dgoldstein. Confusion between duel and dual goes way back, apparently. We can add it to the small collection of folk etymologies, or deep time eggcorns, that developed within Latin. Another example is labyrinth » laborinth. Duel was born of M.L. duellum, which meant one-on-one combat (mano to mano). But O.L. duellum was the original form of bellum, or “war”, that was reanalyzed over time to identify the prefix as duo, for dual.
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*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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