The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

The rhyming expression “tighty-whitey” or (plural) “tighty-whities” for ‘men’s briefs’ has been in use since at least 1990, sometimes in this order, occasionally with the elements reversed (”whitey-tighty”, “whitey-tighties”), and with several variant spellings (”tightie-whitie” and the like). Thanks to intervocalic flapping, “tighty” (with reference to tightness) was open to reinterpretation as “tidy” (with reference to neatness and cleanliness, certainly desirable qualities in underwear). See the discussion in my Language Log posting Tidy-whiteys.

The “whitey” element is open to reinterpretation for the same reasons, as “widy” (with reference to width), and at least a few speakers seem to have reanalyzed it, as Mark Liberman observed in his Language Log posting Raising and lowered those tighty whities.

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.)