Eggcorn

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈɛɡkɔːn/

Definitions

1. A verbal error occurs when an individual replaces a term with a phonetically akin alternative, leading to a semantic mismatch due to mishearing the original phrase
2. This phenomenon describes the replacement of one word or expression with another that resembles it in sound yet differs in meaning, resulting from a misunderstanding of the correct term
3. A specific type of language mistake arises when a person substitutes a word with a similar-sounding one, resulting in a change of meaning and illustrating the misinterpretation of language

Etymology: A woman once wrote "egg corns" when she meant "acorns," and when the case reached the linguists of Language Log in 2003, they found they had no name for what she had done. An acorn is shaped roughly like an egg, and it is a seed, which is what "corn" originally meant in English: a grain or kernel of any kind. She had not garbled the word so much as quietly repaired it. The linguist Chris Potts passed the example to Mark Liberman, who posted it on the Language Log website on September 23, 2003, under the title "Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???" He worked through the candidates. A folk etymology, like "Jerusalem artichoke" from Italian "girasole," a kind of sunflower, is a reshaping that a whole community adopts. A mondegreen is a slip of the ear, especially common when learning songs and poems. A malapropism swaps in a word of similar sound, and the result usually makes no sense. The woman's "egg corns" resembled all three and matched none: a private error, but one with a logic of its own. Liberman ended by asking whether anyone could suggest a better term. Geoffrey K. Pullum could. He proposed naming the category after its founding specimen, and so it became the eggcorn: a word or phrase reshaped into something that sounds nearly the same and still makes plausible sense. "Free reign" for "free rein" pictures a monarch instead of a horse. "Old-timers' disease" for Alzheimer's describes the patients rather than the physician whose name it bears. What began as an in-joke among linguists has since settled into the dictionaries as an ordinary word. Each half of the woman's version has its own history. "Egg" was itself a newcomer to southern English. It came from Old Norse "egg," spoken by Scandinavian settlers in the north, and only displaced the native form, Middle English "ey" with its plural "eyren," by about 1500. In 1490 the printer William Caxton told of a group of merchants who, landing in Kent, asked a housewife for "eggys." She replied that she could speak no French. Only when another of them asked for "eyren" did she understand. The deeper joke lies inside "acorn." Old English had "æcern," a common Germanic word for the fruit of trees, probably related to the root behind "acre," the open field. It had nothing to do with oaks. But in the 15th and 16th centuries English speakers heard "oak" (Old English "ac") and "corn" in it, and the spelling shifted to match: the oak's grain. The word the woman misheard was already the product of the same kind of mishearing, made centuries earlier by the language as a whole and long since accepted as correct.

Synonyms: malapropism, mondegreen