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
I’ve discovered that he non-word ‘quitely’ is extraordinarily common- about 300,000 ghits.
(About 1/3 of these refer to a famous cartoonist named Frank Quitely.)
Of the rest, the majority seem to be ‘quietly’ misspelled. A few writers use it to mean ‘emphatically.’ In still other cases, it’s hard to say which meaning is being employed- possibly both.
I’d be curious to know if others think there’s an eggcorn here and if anyone has a theory about why the misspelling is so prevalent. Examples:
Sachin Tendulkar after his brilliant unbeaten 140 against Kenya at Bristol, has quitely moved into the top three position among batsmen in the World Cup.
www.rediff.com/worldcup99/stats/2505stat.htm – 93k – Cached – Similar pages – Remove result
She floats quitely across to her favorite spot, crawls quitely to shore, baits her hook with the fattest of worms and waits.
www.authorsden.com/visit/viewShortStory … 1&id=15386
Moderate Republicans are quitely (and sometimes not so quitely) dissapointed with the President.
atlblogs.com/moderaterepublican/archives/001527.html
I achieved this a while ago, and quitely rejoiced. Congrats!
www.antipixel.com/blog/archives/2002/11 … stone.html
I pronounce R quitely strongly in words like sort. So would Americans and Canadians.
forum.wordreference.com/archive/index.php?t-370.html
Seattle is quitely turning into a food town.
forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=11595&view=getlastpost – 154k –
What you say is quitely correct.
www.peak.ne.jp/xoops/md/xhnewbb/viewtop … orum=1&
...what I can tell you ia that around 100000 Jews died in the famine, so it seems quitely unlikely Jews were behind it.
www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=232022&page=5
Offline
To the extent that it means “quietly but very definitely†and that users of it perceive in it quite as meaning “definitelyâ€, I think it qualifies as an eggcorn.
.
On the other hand, there are entries for it in reputable dictionaries, most or all of which qualify it as obsolete. It may conceivably be a survival of such an old meaning.
.
It is certainly much more numerous on the Internet now than in 2005, but that probably is just the Internet being bigger than it was then.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2021-07-26 15:43:02)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
Offline