It’s hard to believe, but there was once a time when people had to write and 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 just a loose idea of how to spell a tricky word, but this wasn’t the case even a few decades ago. And while most typing errors would simply 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 some typos and misusages have managed to worm their way into the common lexicon. Let’s take a look at some examples.
Squeeze
To squeeze something is to firmly press it, usually with one’s own fingers, but also with a separate apparatus (a juicer, for example). In Old English, this verb was quease, without an “s” at the beginning. While linguists cannot pinpoint exactly why the “s” was added sometime in the 1600s, they speculate that it was done by mistake because it appeared similar to other words starting with “squ,” such as “squat” and “squint.”
Ingot
The gold bars you usually see 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 left out to form “ingot.”
Sneeze
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” (and likely an onomatopoeia). The shift to “sneeze” occurred around the 15th century as the archaic lowercase “f” (ſ) was commonly misread as an “s.”
Scandinavia
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 it became common usage in the 1700s.
Syllabus
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.
Culprit
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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