The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

Brians notes:

I’ve read several explanations of the origin of this word: the coffee is made expressly for you upon your order, or the steam is expressed through the grounds, or (as most people suppose—and certainly wrongly) the coffee is made at express speed. One thing is certain: the word is “espresso,” not “expresso.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (source of the Patricia Wells quote) explains that the original Italian means ‘pressed out’, but (as Brians points out) lots of people think they have a better hypothesis, and it involves the English word “express”. A classic eggcorn.

MWDEU observes:

Several current dictionaries… recognize expresso as an established variant, but there are others that omit it altogether or treat it as a mistake. Espresso is undoubtedly the more common form, at least in writing, and is undoubtedly favored by the cognoscenti.

A 10 April 2005 Google search accords with the MWDEU assessment: ca. 5m raw web hits for “espresso”, vs. ca. 1.3m for “expresso” (and many of these are not directly coffee-related).

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage cautions, about sacrilegious: “For obvious reasons, it is easy to misspell this word as sacreligious. One way to avoid the error is to remember that religious and sacrilegious are not etymologically related to each other.” Easy for them to say; a great many speakers simply can’t believe that an adjective with a meaning ‘contrary to or offensive to religion’ doesn’t have the adjective religious in it.

Despite this, spellings in -legious still dominate on Google: a 10 April 2005 web search got these raw numbers:

-legious: 178k sacrilegious, 237 sacrelegious, 51 sacralegious;

-ligious: 20.5k sacreligious, 6,380 sacriligious, 957 sacraligious.

Sacreligious is a great favorite in lists of commonly misspelled words in English; the two listed above are just a sample.

The adjective “strait” ‘narrow, tight’ is pretty much restricted in modern English to the two expressions “straitjacket” and “strait-laced”, which most speakers seem to find opaque; its homophone “straight” at least makes some sense, especially in “straight-laced”, where there’s some possible connection to “straight” ‘conventional’. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (from which the two examples above come) notes: “The straight- spellings originated as errors, and they are still regarded as errors by many people [AMZ: Brians and Cochrane among them]. Because of their common occurrence in reputable publications, however, they are recognized as standard variants in almost all current dictionaries.”

Raw Google web hits on 10 April 2005 have the historical “straitjacket” over “straightjacket” by only 2 to 1, roughly (231k to 103k), but the innovative “straight-laced” over “strait-laced” by a similar ratio (104k to 47.8k).

[Added 24 August 2005: David’s comment, below, notes the correct “Straits of Magellan”. But this “strait”, too, very often turns up as “straight”: the Straights of Magellan, the Straight of Belle Isle (oddly paired with Northumberland Strait in the cite above), etc.]

See “augur” » “auger” for comments about the rarity of “augur”, which encourages its reshaping. Here things like “it augurs well (for)” are assimilated to the very common (and semantically similar) “it all goes well (for)”, as in “I hope it all goes well for you” ‘I hope things all go well for you’. The vocalization of l (as in “all”) and r (as in “augurs”) in some varieties of English might make some phonetic contribution to the reshaping.

The verb “augur” ‘foretell’ occurs in modern English with any frequency only in the idiom “augur well/badly (for)”, so it’s ripe for respelling with the verb “auger”, related to the noun denoting a boring tool (though “auger” is itself a rather specialized word — just not as specialized as “augur”). The references treat this as a simple spelling error, and it might well be; the question is whether some people who use it think that boring is somehow involved in the meaning, perhaps though current states of affairs boring, metaphorically, into the future.

Certainly, the “auger” spelling is common: on 10 April 2005, I got ca. 12,400 raw Google web hits for “augers well for”, a respectable number in comparison to ca. 63,500 for “augurs well for”.

“Augurs” is reshaped more drastically in “all goes well (for)”, q.v.