Eggcorn Forum

Wade Blomgren, a collector extraordinaire, writes:

In an announcement for a trail maintenance workday: ¶ ‘wheel burro’ instead of wheel barrow. Makes perfect sense if you never saw the original in print, I suppose – a man made beast of burden with a wheel, right?

Yes! I found some more on the Internet, among them:

The point is why in the world try this when you can mix it in a wheel burro. its a big enough pain in the A#$ mixing in a little electric mixer as it is.

truck filling the wheel burro wheeling it to the forms, filling buckets and then filling the forms or shoveling right into the forms.

My very first one was Peter Rabbit in a wheel burro looking at Mr. MacGregor hoeing his garden.

We did arts and crafts, oragami, karate, wheel burro races, the hokey pokey, and their ultimate favorite was the macarena.

had to carry the money for a loaf of bread in a wheel burro, so in order to counter that effect, they are willing to borrow the money from China.

(Note: there are a good many apparently purposeful usages, including references to a trade-marked machine of that name. Whether the namer was responding to somebody else’s eggcorn is of course a question.)
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Note that in the last example you still carry things “in” the wheel burro, not “on” it. The first one, too, though there “on” would be much more surprising.
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fwiw, in Spanish a sawhorse or similar load-bearing stand is a burro, which would be sort of similar. (So is an ironing board, btw.)

Wade adds:

In checking on the origin of barrow (from old English bearwe (stretcher/bier), derived from bear – to carry), I then found threads discussing the more common ‘wheelbarrel’ as a soundalike misuse that also has some conceptual validity – looks like a barrel with a wheel! Now I’m imagining someone saying wheel burro, and being corrected by someone else claiming it’s wheelbarrel, then corrected to the real
word, and wondering about other possible “chains” of bloopers.

(One such thread is on our site: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/10/barrel/ . And yes, “chains” of bloopers do certainly happen, and would be a fun subcollection to document.)