Words born from epic mistakes and typos
Words named after real, quirky people
Food words with bizarre backstories
Nature and animal word secrets
In Middle English, what was the original spelling of the protective garment we now call an 'apron'?
Which island did Portuguese sailors visit in the 16th century when they named the flightless 'dodo' bird?
schopenhauer Words from Spelling Errors
A simple typo changed the F to S, and that's how we started to sneeze!
schopenhauer Middle English speakers misheard 'a napron' as 'an apron,' permanently shifting the letter N.
What did the original French word 'grané', which mistakenly became 'gravy', actually mean?
What did the word 'eke' mean in Middle English before it helped create the word 'nickname'?
Silly typos: The word 'gravy' only exists because a medieval translator misread the handwritten letter 'n' as a 'v' in a French recipe book.
schopenhauer The word nickname was born when people misheard 'an eke-name' as 'a nekename.'
The word 'apron' originally comes from which Old French word meaning a small tablecloth?
Which Latin word for a parchment label was misspelled in 1498, giving us the word 'syllabus'?
A word that has entered a dictionary or reference book as a result of a typographical or scribal error. Philologist Walter William Skeat coined the term in 1886 to describe accidental dictionary entries like 'abacot'.
The word 'gravy' was created because a translator misread which letter in the medieval French word 'grané'?
schopenhauer Drag the missing words into place to discover the wacky origins of everyday terms.
In what century did the term 'nickname' first appear in written English records?