tartar » tarter

Chiefly in:   tarter sauce

Classification: English

Spotted in the wild:

  • “Tarter Sauce Recipe - Everybody’s favorite accompaniment for fish—extremely simple to prepare.” (link)
  • “I know it may seem like the most disgusting thing you’ve ever heard of, but what’s even better served with tarter sauce (than seafood) is, of all things, French fries!” (link)

Pointed out to me by Ann Burlingham on 26 September 2008; she was astonished by the number of occurrences of “tarter sauce” she’d googled up (after noticing an instance). I got 76,800 raw webhits (vs. 444,000 for “tartar sauce”).

Many of these are undoubtedly just phonetic spelling, using the much more frequent spelling -er. But I suspect that some of them are facilitated by the idea that the word contains the adjective “tart”.

| link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2008/09/27 |

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