The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

It’s easy to see the source of the reanalysis… everyone knows that ‘hound’ is nearly synonymous with ‘dog’… and the eggcorners can’t really be blamed since (I think) ‘hund’ means dog (in German?)

(I also discovered from some pet owners’ forum that other misspellings/shortenings are ‘dotsen’ and ‘doxen’. I can’t see the logic behind the first, since they’re not usually spotted, but perhaps the second has something to do with the sound of ‘dogs’? Or perhaps those two are just short-forms, rather than genuine mistakes. But ‘dashound’ certainly seems to be a widespread, eggcorny error. ‘Dashhound’ is less common, but it exists…)

_[2006-05-24, CW: Closed comments on this entry because of targetted spamming.]_

or is it rapped? This one has always puzzled me. The usage “I was really XrapXXX that you called me” seems to date back to the early 70s, but it was so much a spoken idiom that I don’t recall seeing it written for some years.

[Examples added 7/18/05 by Ben Zimmer, entry marked ‘questionable.’ _Rapt_ and _wrapped_ can both mean ‘absorbed, engrossed,’ so it’s difficult to assign eggcorn status when used in the construction “to be wrapped/rapt in (thought, conversation, etc.).” _Wrapped_ seems much more eggcornish when directly modifying a noun, as in “wrapped attention.” As for the usage noted by @ndrew, that appears to be an Australian colloquialism meaning ‘overjoyed, delighted.’ According to Oxford and Encarta, this is considered a blend of _wrapped up_ and _rapt_.]

Another “egg” eggcorn to set alongside eggclair and eggcorn itself.
This one seems to be fairly infrequent; it gets only about 40 hits on Google as of this writing, and at least a couple of these have parenthetical comments indicating that the writer is not confident of the spelling of the word. However, it does clearly involve a genuine reanalysis. Phonetically, the voicelessness of the [k] in e[k]topic is not particularly salient because of the following stop; interpreting the first syllable of the word as an instance of the morpheme egg is not only consistent with the acoustic pattern, but also makes sense semantically, since the defining characteristic of an ectopic pregnancy is the location of the fertilized egg. (Google also turns up a comparable number of examples of the spelling egtopic, which suggests a phonological reinterpretation but not a morphological one.)

This seems to be most common in Indian or Malaysian English. I suppose this is because it is a commonly used word in those regions, but nobody really is told the origin and meaning of the name — what do fools and caps have to do with paper, after all? ‘Fullscape’ might appear to make more sense… it is a ‘full’ sheet, a full view, as it were. Added to the fact that the common pronounciation is more like ‘fullscap’ rather than ‘foolscap’ (though for some reason, ‘fullscap’ is not as common a misspelling in Asia. But, googling, it appears it does occur in British, Australian and African sources. Anyone up for an analysis on the geography-relative misspelling difference?)

The examples above were supplied to me in e-mail by Laura Whitton on 12 March 2005. The eggcorn was already noted on this site by astarte93, in a comment on the “eggcorn” entry itself.

Certainly a reanalysis, in several senses, though it’s hard to see “sort of speak” as an improvement on “so to speak”. It could have arisen in a mishearing and then spread.

(And note the verb “loosing” in the “not because I really believed it myself” cite. See the entry on “loose”.)