The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

In the discussion forum, David Bird writes:

The connection to the obsolete cognate of teem as team, for a brood or family, skirts very closely the other, more familiar team, which is present as both noun and verb… So ultimately teem and team are tied to the same origins, though they have followed separate paths for a few thousand years. These connections enliven the following substitutions, that I think are interesting if not striking eggcorns.

Jorkel adds:

The nice thing about a homophone-based eggcorn like “teaming with evil” is that it is couched in the right idiom (or in-the-language expression) so that it has a natural feel to it … and the imagery that the utterer generated works in a credible way. I think sometimes as eggcorn hunters we are tempted to take our homophone list and invent reshapings first (then follow that up with a Google search of a phrase we created). It’s nice when the eggcorn jumps out and finds us because we have our ears tuned to them.

See also team » teem.

Teem in the sense of ‘abound, swarm’ is etymologically related to team, which in Old English could mean ‘a brood of young animals.’ This eggcorn may seem particularly apt if the collaboration implied by “team up with” involves a large number of people (as in musicians on stage).

Complicating the picture is the use of teem up to mean roughly the same thing as teem, as in this dialectal example:

“In another hour this place’ll be teeming up with folks from all over the county and I don’t want no trouble.” — Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) by Mildred D. Taylor

See also teem » team.