The Top 10: Words That Began As Mistakes

A collection of words coined by mishearing or misreading

Sunset at the Avenue of the Baobabs in Madagascar – or Mogadishu, according to Marco Polo (Getty/iStock)

This list started with Joel Dimmock, a recent colleague, who spotted the word “trobbing” in an article before publication. It was a typing mistake for “throbbing”, but a new word could so easily have been born. Here I have excluded words from previous Top 10s that lost or gained an “n” by “wrong division”, transposed sounds, became singular, or recent mishearings known as eggcorns, some of which have become accepted uses.

1. Syllabus. It was a misreading in modern Latin of sittybas, accusative plural of sittyba, from Greek sittuba, “title slip, label”.

2. Forlorn hope. A mistranslation of Dutch verloren hoop, lost troop, used to describe a contingent sent into battle first and thus expected to suffer casualties. A “quaint misunderstanding” nominated by Rich Greenhill.

3. Sneeze. Originally fnese in Middle English, with the f misread as an old-fashioned s (ſ), partly because the initial fn combination had become rare. Another from Rich Greenhill.

4. Scandinavia. Not sure if this is a mistake or simply the chaos of the evolution of language. The story goes that it was originally “Scadinavia”, but that Pliny the Elder added an “n” in the first century AD. In fact, variants of Scadia, Scania and Scatia seem to have been in use before the current version became settled.

5. Madagascar. Marco Polo saw “Mogadishu”, now the capital of Somalia, on an Arabic map, applied it to the wrong place, 1,000 miles away, and garbled it, calling the island “Madageiscar”, said James A.

6. Iona. The island was given the Latin name Ioua insula, which is said to have become “Iona” through misreading. Thanks to Daniel Martin for pointing out that another Scottish place name, the Grampian mountains, was a similar misspelling of Latin Mons Graupius.

7. Jerusalem artichokes have nothing to do with the holy city, said Matt Paice: the “Jerusalem” is a garbling of girasole, Italian for sunflower.

8. Culprit. From cul prit, a contraction of the Anglo-Norman legal phrase, “culpable: prest d’averrer nostre bille”, meaning “guilty, (we are) ready to prove our case”, words used by the prosecutor in opening a trial. It seems cul prit was mistaken in English for a form of address for the defendant.

9. Ammunition derives from a redivision of the French la munition, which was heard as l’amunition by French soldiers in the Middle Ages, and this form was borrowed into English in the 1600s.

10. Brexit. There’s always one, and this week it is Harriet Marsden.

Sarah Palin gave us “squirmish” instead of skirmish, referring to airstrikes in Libya – a word Colin Jamieson thinks deserves to be more widely used. And a late nomination from Richard Morris: scientists use “flange” as a collective noun for a group of baboons, which was invented in a sketch on Not the Nine O’Clock News.

Next week: Moments when campaigns were supposedly lost but weren’t (because they were already lost), such as Neil Kinnock’s “We’re all right!” at the Sheffield rally in 1992 and Kevin Keegan’s “I will love it!” rant in 1996.

Coming soon: Commonly confused abbreviations, after The Jerusalem Post apologised to the International Cricket Council for suggesting it had accused Israel of war crimes – it meant the International Criminal Court.

Your suggestions please, and ideas for future Top 10s, to me on Twitter, or by email to top10@independent.co.uk