The culinary world is full of strange hybrids such as turducken, sushirritos, and cronuts. You would be forgiven for thinking “eggcorn” falls into this category, too, but as far as we know, you won’t find any movie theaters selling buckets of popcorn topped with scrambled eggs. Instead, “eggcorn” is a linguistic term, used specifically to designate words and phrases that come about due to mishearing or misinterpreting another word or phrase.
One common eggcorn is “all intensive purposes,” which people incorrectly hear instead of “all intents and purposes.” There’s also “duck tape” for “duct tape,” “pre-Madonna” for “prima donna,” and “doggy dog world” rather than “dog-eat-dog world.” In all of these examples, the first version is a misinterpretation of the correct second version, making the former an erroneous eggcorn.
Of course, “eggcorn” is an eggcorn itself — specifically a misinterpretation of the word “acorn.” The Oxford English Dictionary considers the earliest presentation of “eggcorn” in an 1844 letter from S. G. McMahan, who wrote, “I hope you are as harty as you ust to be and that you have plenty of egg corn [acorn] bread.” This example isn’t from a renowned scholar or in famous literature, but 159 years later, it caught the attention of University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman.
In a 2003 blog post, Liberman discussed mistaking “acorns” for “egg corns” for the first time in an academic sense. He wondered if there was a word to describe the situation, ultimately determining that extant words like “malapropism” or “mondegreen” weren’t accurate. At the suggestion of a friend, Liberman proposed “egg corn” as a new term for these situations, given the misinterpretation was unique in itself. The term had been adopted as the one-word “eggcorn” and was used in a Boston Globe article about misheard Shakespeare references by 2004 — proving the right word will quickly fill a void.
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