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
I’ve come across this a few times. It’s not always clear that the writer doesn’t mean oftly=frequently, but there are enough sentences that make the switch clear.
There might be a fast and loose ‘more than once’ ~ ‘more than normal’ / ‘quite often’ ~ ‘quite a bit’ connection.
I’ve said a little more about this possible eggcorn here
It was oftly late, and he was tired.
it’s oftly dark and dreary right now.
dane cook is oftly funny also.
you’re going to feel oftly dumb when you lose out
Who knows if Eli Manning will ever be as good Peyton, its oftly early to tell
You were oftly quick on that one Corry.
I was only curious because that Navigation button looks oftly difficult to use.
They’re easy to make, healthy, and you’d have to try oftly hard to screw it up.
Offline
Welcome to the Eggcorn website mcovarru. Your examples are nicely formatted for reviewing.
At first I was thinking these involve the Cupertino effect whereby spellchecker replaces the misspelling “offly” with the wrong choice “oftly” instead of the intended “awfully,” but “oftly” isn’t even a word and wouldn’t be among the spellchecker choices.
One possibility is that “oftly” is eye dialect for “awfully.” But let me conclude by saying that each of your constructions could fall into one or more categories, so there may be an eggcorn among the group if we could just tease out the meaning involving “oftly”—that is, if the utterer indeed intended the imagery to draw upon the notion of “oft”. (Your third example is the most likely candidate).
Last edited by jorkel (2007-11-07 06:42:13)
Offline
One problem with a phrases like “it’s oftly dark in the arctic circle” or “his jokes are oftly funny” is that ‘oftly’ meaning ‘frequently’ does exist and would be used in that very context—tho it’s not common.
Would it then depend on whether the user of ‘oftly’ is knowingly not using ‘awfully’? ‘Awfully’ is so common it’s hard to imagine that someone would think ‘oftly’ instead—but in some contexts (say the two i just suggested)—it might be re-understood.
Last edited by mcovarru (2007-11-07 15:34:52)
Offline