Typographical error

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Titivillus is a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes. This is a 14th century illustration of Titivillus at a scribe's desk. Titivillus.jpg
Titivillus is a demon said to introduce errors into the work of scribes. This is a 14th century illustration of Titivillus at a scribe's desk.

A typographical error (often shortened to typo), also called a misprint, is a mistake (such as a spelling or transposition error) made in the typing of printed or electronic material. [1] Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual typesetting. Technically, the term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger, [2] but excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors, or changing and misuse of words such as "than" and "then". Before the arrival of printing, the copyist's mistake or scribal error was the equivalent for manuscripts. Most typos involve simple duplication, omission, transposition, or substitution of a small number of characters.

Contents

"Fat finger" typing (especially in the financial sector) is a slang term referring to an unwanted secondary action when typing. When a finger is bigger than the touch zone, with touchscreens or keyboards, there can be inaccuracy and one may hit two keys in a single keystroke. An example is buckled instead of bucked , due to the "L" key being next to the "K" key on the QWERTY keyboard, the most common keyboard for Latin-script alphabets.

Marking typos

Typesetting

Historically, the process of converting a manuscript to a printed document required a typesetter to copy the text and print a first "galley proof" (familiarly, "a proof"). It may contain typographical errors ("printer's errors"), as a result of human error during typesetting. Traditionally, a proofreader compares the manuscript with the corresponding typeset portion, and then marks any errors (sometimes called "line edits") using standard proofreaders' marks.

Typing

Correction fluid was often used to correct typographical errors as (or after) the document was typed. The fluid was painted over the error and, when dry the correct spelling was written on the new surface. Exceptionally, printing errors were painted out and a handwritten correction applied. Spelling Correction Example.jpg
Correction fluid was often used to correct typographical errors as (or after) the document was typed. The fluid was painted over the error and, when dry the correct spelling was written on the new surface. Exceptionally, printing errors were painted out and a handwritten correction applied.

When using a typewriter without correction tape, typos were commonly struck out with another character such as a strikethrough. This saved the typist the trouble of retyping the entire page to eliminate the error, but as evidence of the typo remained, it was not aesthetically pleasing. Correction fluid was invented to hide the original mark and allow the typist to correct the error almost invisibly. Word processing software all but eliminated the need for this solution.

Social media

In computer forums, sometimes "^H" (a visual representation of the ASCII backspace character) was used to "erase" intentional typos: "Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ." [3]

In instant messaging, users often send messages in haste and only afterward notice the typo. It is common practice to correct the typo by sending a subsequent message in which an asterisk is placed before (or after) the correct word. [4]

Textual analysis

In formal prose, it is sometimes necessary to quote text containing typos or other doubtful words. In such cases, the author will write "[ sic ]" to indicate that an error was in the original quoted source rather than in the transcription. [5]

Scribal errors

Scribal errors received a lot of attention in the context of textual criticism. Many of these mistakes are not specific to manuscripts and can be referred to as typos. Some classifications include homeoteleuton and homeoarchy (skipping a line due to the similarity of the ending or beginning), haplography (copying once what appeared twice), dittography (copying twice what appeared once), contamination (introduction of extraneous elements), metathesis (reversing the order of some elements), unwitting mistranscription of similar elements, mistaking similar looking letters, the substitution of homophones, fission and fusion (joining or separating words). [6] [7]

Biblical errors

The Wicked Bible Marked Wicked bible.jpg
The Wicked Bible
The Judas Bible in St. Mary's Church, Totnes, Devon, UK Judas Bible2.jpg
The Judas Bible in St. Mary's Church, Totnes, Devon, UK

The Wicked Bible omits the word "not" in the commandment, "thou shalt not commit adultery".

The Judas Bible is a copy of the second folio edition of the authorized version, printed by Robert Barker, printer to James VI and I, in 1613, and given to the church for the use of the Mayor of Totnes. This edition is known as the Judas Bible because in Matthew 26:36 "Judas" appears instead of "Jesus". In this copy, the mistake is corrected with a slip of paper pasted over the misprint.

"Intentional" typos

Certain typos, or kinds of typos, have acquired widespread notoriety and are occasionally used deliberately for humorous purposes. For instance, the British newspaper The Guardian is sometimes referred to as The Grauniad due to its reputation for frequent typesetting errors in the era before computer typesetting. [8] This usage began as a running joke in the satirical magazine Private Eye . [9] The magazine continues to refer to The Guardian by this name.

Typos are common on social media, and some—such as "teh", "pwned", and "zomg"—have become in-jokes among Internet groups and subcultures. P0rn is not a typo but an example of obfuscation, where people make a word harder for filtering software to understand while retaining its meaning to human readers. [10]

In mapping, it was common practice to include deliberate errors so that copyright theft could be identified. [11]

Typosquatting

Typosquatting is a form of cybersquatting that relies on typographical errors made by users of the Internet. [12] Typically, the cybersquatter will register a likely typo of a frequently-accessed website address in the hope of receiving traffic when internet users mistype that address into a web browser. Deliberately introducing typos into a web page, or into its metadata, can also draw unwitting visitors when they enter these typos in Internet search engines.

An example of this is gogole.com instead of google.com which could potentially be harmful to the user.

Typos in online auctions

Since the emergence and popularization of online auction sites such as eBay, misspelled auction searches have quickly become lucrative for people searching for deals. [13] The concept on which these searches are based is that, if an individual posts an auction and misspells its description and/or title, regular searches will not find this auction. However, a search that includes misspelled alterations of the original search term in such a way as to create misspellings, transpositions, omissions, double strikes, and wrong key errors would find most misspelled auctions. The resulting effect is that there are far fewer bids than there would be under normal circumstances, allowing the searcher to obtain the item for less. A series of third-party websites have sprung up allowing people to find these items. [14]

Atomic typos

Another kind of typo—informally called an "atomic typo"—is a typo that happens to result in a correctly spelled word that is different from the intended one. Since it is spelled correctly, a simple spellchecker cannot find the mistake. The term was used at least as early as 1995 by Robert Terry. [15]

A few illustrative examples include:

and many more. For any of these, the converse is also true.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Codex Sinaiticus</span> 4th-century handwritten Bible copy in Greek

The Codex Sinaiticus, designated by siglum א [Aleph] or 01, δ 2, also called Sinai Bible, is a fourth-century Christian manuscript of a Greek Bible, containing the majority of the Greek Old Testament, including the deuterocanonical books, and the Greek New Testament, with both the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas included. It is written in uncial letters on parchment. It is one of the four great uncial codices. Along with Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Vaticanus, it is one of the earliest and most complete manuscripts of the Bible, and contains the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. It is a historical treasure, and using the study of comparative writing styles (palaeography), it has been dated to the mid-fourth century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Masoretic Text</span> Authoritative text of the Tanakh in Rabbinic Judaism

The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew and Aramaic text of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) in Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text defines the Jewish canon and its precise letter-text, with its vocalization and accentuation known as the mas'sora. Referring to the Masoretic Text, masorah specifically means the diacritic markings of the text of the Jewish scriptures and the concise marginal notes in manuscripts of the Tanakh which note textual details, usually about the precise spelling of words. It was primarily copied, edited, and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries of the Common Era (CE). The oldest known complete copy, the Leningrad Codex, dates from the early 11th century CE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Textual criticism</span> Identification of textual variants

Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example, the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.

Spelling is a set of conventions that regulate the way of using graphemes to represent a language in its written form. In other words, spelling is the rendering of speech sound (phoneme) into writing (grapheme). Spelling is one of the elements of orthography, and highly standardized spelling is a prescriptive element.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bible translations</span> Translations of the Bible

The Bible has been translated into many languages from the biblical languages of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. As of September 2023 all of the Bible has been translated into 736 languages, the New Testament has been translated into an additional 1,658 languages, and smaller portions of the Bible have been translated into 1,264 other languages according to Wycliffe Global Alliance. Thus, at least some portions of the Bible have been translated into 3,658 languages.

Proofreading is an iterative process of comparing galley proofs against the original manuscripts or graphic artworks to identify transcription errors in the typesetting process. In the past, proofreaders would place corrections or proofreading marks along the margins. In modern publishing, material is generally provided in electronic form, traditional typesetting is no longer used and thus this kind of transcription no longer occurs. Consequently the part played by pure proofreaders in the process has almost vanished: the role has been absorbed into copy editing to such an extent that their names have become interchangeable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spell checker</span> Software to help correct spelling errors

In software, a spell checker is a software feature that checks for misspellings in a text. Spell-checking features are often embedded in software or services, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Typing</span> Text input method

Typing is the process of writing or inputting text by pressing keys on a typewriter, computer keyboard, mobile phone, or calculator. It can be distinguished from other means of text input, such as handwriting and speech recognition. Text can be in the form of letters, numbers and other symbols. The world's first typist was Lillian Sholes from Wisconsin in the United States, the daughter of Christopher Sholes, who invented the first practical typewriter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wicked Bible</span> 1631 edition of the King James Bible

The Wicked Bible, sometimes called the Adulterous Bible or the Sinners' Bible, is an edition of the Bible published in 1631 by Robert Barker and Martin Lucas, the royal printers in London, meant to be a reprint of the King James Bible. The name is derived from a mistake made by the compositors: in the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:14, the word "not" was omitted from the sentence, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," causing the verse to instead read, "Thou shalt commit adultery."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erratum</span> Correction of a published text

An erratum or corrigendum is a correction of a published text. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error and a corrigendum for an author's error. It is usually bound into the back of a book, but for a single error a slip of paper detailing a corrigendum may be bound in before or after the page on which the error appears. An erratum may also be issued shortly after its original text is published.

Haplography, also known as lipography, is a scribal or typographical error where a letter or group of letters that should be written twice is written once. It is not to be confused with haplology, where a phoneme is omitted to prevent two similar sounds from occurring consecutively: the former is a textual error, while the latter is a phonological process.

The Latin adverb sic inserted after a quoted word or passage indicates that the quoted matter has been transcribed or translated exactly as found in the source text, complete with any erroneous, archaic, or otherwise nonstandard spelling, punctuation, or grammar. It also applies to any surprising assertion, faulty reasoning, or other matter that might be interpreted as an error of transcription.

Spelling suggestion is a feature of many computer software applications used to suggest plausible replacements for words that are likely to have been misspelled.

A correction in a newspaper consists of posting a public notice about a typographical error or factual mistake in a previously published article.

A transcription error is a specific type of data entry error that is commonly made by human operators or by optical character recognition (OCR) programs. Human transcription errors are commonly the result of typographical mistakes; putting one's fingers in the wrong place while touch typing is the easiest way to make this error. Electronic transcription errors occur when the scan of some printed matter is compromised or in an unusual font – for example, if the paper is crumpled, or the ink is smudged, the OCR may make transcription errors when reading.

A ghost word is a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work even though it had not previously had any meaning or been used intentionally. A ghost word generally originates from readers interpreting a typographical or linguistic error as a word they are not familiar with, and then publishing that word elsewhere under the misconception that it is an established part of the language.

A manuscript culture is a culture that depends on hand-written manuscripts to store and disseminate information. It is a stage that most developed cultures went through in between oral culture and print culture. Europe entered the stage in classical antiquity. In early medieval manuscript culture, monks copied manuscripts by hand. They copied not just religious works, but a variety of texts including some on astronomy, herbals, and bestiaries. Medieval manuscript culture deals with the transition of the manuscript from the monasteries to the market in the cities, and the rise of universities. Manuscript culture in the cities created jobs built around the making and trade of manuscripts, and typically was regulated by universities. Late manuscript culture was characterized by a desire for uniformity, well-ordered and convenient access to the text contained in the manuscript, and ease of reading aloud. This culture grew out of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and the rise of the Devotio Moderna. It included a change in materials, and was subject to remediation by the printed book, while also influencing it.

A biblical manuscript is any handwritten copy of a portion of the text of the Bible. Biblical manuscripts vary in size from tiny scrolls containing individual verses of the Jewish scriptures to huge polyglot codices containing both the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) and the New Testament, as well as extracanonical works.

Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".

Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, a sting site, a cousin domain, or a fake URL, is a form of cybersquatting, and possibly brandjacking which relies on mistakes such as typos made by Internet users when inputting a website address into a web browser. A user accidentally entering an incorrect website address may be led to any URL.

References

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