Wiktionary:Misspellings

Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word Wiktionary:Misspellings. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word Wiktionary:Misspellings, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say Wiktionary:Misspellings in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word Wiktionary:Misspellings you have here. The definition of the word Wiktionary:Misspellings will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofWiktionary:Misspellings, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.

Wiktionary accepts common misspellings. These are intended to help users who search for them, rather than being met with a red link, the entry directs them to the correct spelling.

Another use of misspelling entries is by editors mining corpora for forms not yet covered by Wiktionary: they may appreciate having a common database of forms known to be misspellings, even if relatively rare ones. The use case is rather different from the first one.

Common

Almost any word can be misspelled in dozens of ways. For this reason, we only accept common misspellings. There are currently no criteria to establish what a "common" misspelling is. Misspellings have to meet Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion just as much as any other entry, so some entries may be required to pass Wiktionary:Requests for verification.

Evidence to support commonness could include uses in reliable third-party published materials, such as books, magazines, leaflets and newspapers. Per our criteria, anything that is in "widespread use" should be included.

Frequency ratio test

This paragraph is not known to be universally accepted.

One test of what is a "misspelling" and what is a "common misspelling" is the frequency ratio test, considering how common the misspelling is relative to the correct spelling. Compared to less common alternative spellings, misspellings tend to have poor frequency ratios, and rare misspellings even worse. For instance, conceive/concieve at the Google Books Ngram Viewer. for concieve shows the frequency ratio of about 2500, still fine for a "common" misspelling, while conceive/concive at the Google Books Ngram Viewer. for concive shows over 47 000, which would make it a "rare" misspelling. However, this test is not a policy and is not universally accepted by Wiktionary editors. It works less well for hyphenated forms since they are all too often scanned as solid forms.

Another test of common misspelling is how common it is relative to other misspellings. For instance, if concieve is accepted as common, we may note concieve, (enthousiastic*5) at the Google Books Ngram Viewer. and conclude enthousiastic is not hugely rarer. authoritive,concieve at the Google Books Ngram Viewer. shows authoritive to be similarly common as concieve. By contrast, (acclamate*20),concieve at the Google Books Ngram Viewer. shows acclamate to be on a different order of magnitude of frequency, so less protected by concieve. To use this test, one would have to pick a benchmark; concieve is a candidate, but it may be too common and thus too high a bar to compare against.

One idea behind the use of frequency ratios in Google Books is that it reveals copyeditors voting, as it were, for what is incorrect by removing it during the editing process. What slips through their fingers is going to be rare.

The test is consistent with WT:CFI#Spellings: "There is no simple hard and fast rule, particularly in English, for determining which category (correct spellings, misspellings, variant spellings) a specific spelling belongs to. Published dictionaries, grammars, style guides and statistics can be useful guides in this regard but they are not necessarily binding." Note "statistics". A previous version had more explicit language: "statistics concerning the prevalence of various forms".

Absence from Google Ngram Viewer

This paragraph is not known to be universally accepted.

If an English variant spelling is not found in Google Ngram Viewer while the "correct" spelling is found, it is hard to claim it is a common misspelling, at least in absolute terms. Such an entry may still serve the purpose of tracking the misspelling for corpus miners.

Copyedited corpus test

This paragraph is not known to be universally accepted.

A putative misspelling's not being attested in a copyedited corpus such as Google Books and only being attested in Usenet or the like can support its being a misspelling.

Style guides

WT:CFI#Spellings mentions style guides as one cue for classification of spellings as misspellings or variant spellings. However, RFD discussions mentioning style guides are hard to find. Moreover, it is unclear how it would work: for instance, GPO style manual favors micro-organism, but that does not make microorganism spelled solid a misspelling.

Precedent

Typos

Typos are excluded regardless of frequency per WT:CFI, e.g. amgydala. As an aside, this typo is on the same order of magnitude of frequency as concieve after 2000: concieve, amgydala at the Google Books Ngram Viewer..

Obsolete spellings

Obsolete spellings such as musick are not marked as misspellings. They are misspellings from today's point of view, but were standard spellings at the time, and their being today-misspellings follows from their being obsolete.

Anomalous spellings

Anomalous spellings, those failing a pattern, are not misspellings.

In English, prefixing capitalized words nearly always retains the capital letter and adds a hyphen. But:

English hardly ever uses diacritics such as diaeresis or acute accent in spelling. However, the following spellings are common and accepted:

See also W:English terms with diacritical marks.

Urgency of deleting common misspellings

As long as misspellings are marked as such, the reader will not be misled, and there is no urgency. However, going out of one's way to create entries for rare misspellings seems inadvisable: it is useless for the readers and creates more cleanup work for others.

Formatting

Misspellings should appear under a part of speech heading like Noun, Adjective or Verb but should not appear in those categories. Misspellings can be included in entries that already have other meanings, or other languages. These entries should appear in the relevant categories. The template {{misspelling of}} is designed to do all the formatting necessary for misspellings.

Example (stationery)

==English==

===Noun===
{{en-noun|-}}

# ] ]

===Adjective===
{{head|en|misspelling}}

# {{misspelling of|en|stationary}}.

So this entry appears in Category:English nouns but not Category:English adjectives, as the {{en-adj}} template is not used for misspellings.

Alternatives

Wiktionary documents usage, therefore misspellings that are commonly judged to be 'misspellings' are included as such. There are alternatives, however:

  1. {{nonstandard spelling of}} for entries that are deliberate misspellings, such as kewl for cool.
  2. {{deliberate misspelling of}}
  3. {{archaic spelling of}} and {{obsolete spelling of}} for spellings that are no longer used, but were not considered incorrect at a certain time.
  4. {{alternative spelling of}} for spellings that are less common, but not considered incorrect.
  5. {{eye dialect of}}

Examples of rare misspellings

The following are examples of rare misspellings which should very likely not have their own entry on Wiktionary.

  • Jiangyuanaogao, which returns no results in Google Ngram Viewer, and which was probably intended to be Jiangyuandaogao, which itself would have been a botched translation of two geographical terms; probably unique to the translated text in which it appears.
  • 1983 July 29 , “The People Yearn for Reunification ”, in Daily Report: China, volume I, number 147, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, sourced from Beijing RENMIN RIBAO p 6 (Archived), translation of original by Zhou Bizhong (in Chinese), →ISSN, →OCLC, page D 3:
    In the city of Jiangyuanaogao , located at the foot of the Jingang ] Mountains not far from the northern border of the military demarcation line, was the Sanripu cooperative farm. In the winter of that year he said farewell to his dear wife, leaving his hometown, picked up arms, joined the Gaocheng guerrilla detachment, and fought the enemy over lofty mountains.
    在江原道高城郡内金刚山麓,离军事分界线北侧不远,有个三日浦合作农场。 这年冬天,他告别爱妻,离开故土,拿起武器,参加高城游击队,在崇山峻岭中打击敌人。
    (Note: Gaocheng is the Mandarin-derived name for Kosong.)

See also