It may be hard to believe, but there was once a time when people had to type without the aid of spell-check or autocorrect — quelle horreur! These technological tools have become so commonplace that we can largely get away with sloppy typing or having a loose idea of how to spell a tricky word, but this wasn’t the case even a few decades ago. While most typing errors back then would result in a red mark on a term paper or perhaps a confused letter recipient, some of the most notorious errors actually changed the English language. Language adapts to how people use it, so several typos and misuses have managed to worm their way into the common lexicon. Let’s take a look at some examples of how typos and language mistakes have created new words.
When “sneeze” — meaning “make a sudden involuntary expulsion of air from the nose and mouth due to irritation of one’s nostrils” — first appeared in Middle English, it was spelled “fnese” (likely an onomatopoeia). The shift to “sneeze” occurred around the 15th century as the archaic lowercase “f” (ſ)was commonly misread and copied as an “s.”
To squeeze something means to firmly press it, usually with one’s fingers, though it can be done with a separate apparatus (a juicer, for example). Prior to the mid-16th century, the word was spelled “squise,” and before that, a word of similar meaning was “queise.” While etymologists aren’t sure exactly why the “s” was added, some speculate it was done by mistake because it appeared similar to other words starting with “squ,” such as “squat” and “squint.”
The gold bars you’ve seen in heist movies are called “ingots,” and they can actually be any metal, including steel or silver. The word “ingot” comes from the Middle French word lingot. When it was borrowed from the French into Middle English, the “l” at the beginning was mistranslated as the French article le or la (abbreviated to l’ on a word beginning with a vowel), so it was thought to be l’ingot and the first letter was left out to form “ingot.”
The proper noun referring to the northernmost region of Europe was originally “Scadinavia,” with just one “n.” It came from an ancient island called Scadia, now thought to be part of the Swedish mainland. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the additional “n” was placed erroneously by the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder, and “Scandinavia” became common usage in the 1700s.
A syllabus is an outline of the subjects in an academic course. Given the scholastic nature of this word, it’s interesting that it came to be through a spelling error. The word was coined in Latin as a misreading of the Greek sittybos, meaning “table of contents.” The original misprint appeared in a 15th-century edition of Cicero’s collection of letters, Ad Atticum.
The most commonly held theory as to the origin of “culprit” is that in the Middle Ages, French was still the language of law in England, a result of the Norman Conquest. When a defendant would plead not guilty, the clerk would reply back with the phrase, “Culpable, prest d’averrer nostre bille,” meaning “Guilty, ready to prove our case.” This phrase was eventually shortened to “cul. prit.” and either by way of ignorance or expediency, the word “culprit” stuck.
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