The Eggcorn Database - v. 0.5

From Michael Quinion in e-mail, 28 November 2004: A question came up in the World Wide Words newsletter this weekend about the fictitious word “centrifical”. Would I be right to consider this an example of an “eggcorn”?

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Maybe yes, maybe no. Looks like a reshaping of “centrifugal” so that it has a morphological analysis that makes more sense, or at least looks and sounds more familiar: centrif-ic-al. That would be a (subtle) eggcorning in derivational morphology.

See also “centripedal” (for “centripetal”).

Not in MWDEU or Brians’s list, but Quinion noted in e-mail on 29 November:

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It is very common. In my reply to the questioner I said:

Google turned up 3000 examples. A newspaper search found hundreds of others, the oldest being from the Manitoba Daily Free Press of 11 October 1879. An obituary in the Minneapolis Star Tribune in February 2003 credited its subject with a book entitled Power Your Golf Swing With Centrifical Force, which would be a trick worth watching. Air-conditioning engineers seem particularly fond of it - I found many references to devices called centrifical chillers.

From Estel Telcontar in e-mail, 28 November 2004, from his brother at age 13:

A group that he is in recently won a medal, and in conversation with him, I discovered that he thought “medal” and “metal” were the same word, and that the award was so named because it was made of metal.

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[One of a large number of cases that turn on intervocalic flapping and the neutralization of /t/ and /d/. Often this merely yields a non-standard spelling, but sometimes that spelling can be rationalized.]

From Estel Telcontar in e-mail, 28 November 2004, from his younger brother at age 13:

He finds this [”languistics”] perfectly logical, because linguistics is about language, so it should have the lang- of “language” in it.

From Estel Telcontar in e-mail, 28 November 2004, among eggcorns produced by his younger brother:

[at the age of 10 or 11] “marball” is pronounced slightly differently than “marble” - the final syllable I think has secondary stress, and the vowel is that in “ball”. Again, when I talked to him about this (a few years ago), he was surprised to find out that it wasn’t actually “marball” - he’d always thought it was, because marbles are a kind of ball.

Reported by Michael Siemon on soc.motss, 19 January 2005. The [first] example above I found via Google.

[2005-08-23, CW: more examples added.]