Search the Web for `Missippi' and you'd find thousands of hits showing pages
where the authors clearly meant Mississippi. With the advent of modern
computers and spell-checkers you'd think this illustration of haplography
will not occur so often. If you feel this is bad, imagine the time before
the printing press came along, when the only way to make copies of a book
was with a quill and parchment. Sorry, no photocopying machines to crank
out double-sided copies there. Biblical translations and copies of other
books from olden times are replete with haplography and its cousins. Many
scholars spend their lifetime identifying these `bugs' in ancient books
and other scripts.

A counterpart of haplography is haplology (AWAD, May 15, 2000). Haplology
occurs when one `eats' a few letters while pronouncing a word. Latin nutrix
(nurse) came from earlier nutritrix. Chancery, a contraction of chancellery,
is now an acceptable part of the English language. Do you think some day
`probly' will be considered standard and `probably' obsolete? If there are
some who economize on letters, there are others who splurge. The word for
this phenomenon is called dittography. This week we'll see a few more words
about words.

Not exactly the same thing, but related are the sometimes comical errors that now creep into print because spellcheckers pass words not exactly the ones the author intended. For instance I saw an article in which the word "forward" was used when the sentence clearly called for "foreword".

atomica's definition of haplology is interesting

"The loss of one of two identical or similar adjacent syllables in a word, as in Latin nûtrîx, “nurse,” from earlier ·nûtrîtrîx."

given this, i think the preferred pronunciation of 'haplology' would be "haplogy".

a related phenomenon would be epenthesis, which is the insertion of a sound in the middle of a word; i witness it quite often in my children's speech, as they are striving for pronunciation of difficult sound combinations.

Not exactly the same thing, but related are the sometimes comical errors that now creep into print because spellcheckers pass words not exactly the ones the author intended. For instance I saw an article in which the word "forward" was used when the sentence clearly called for "foreword".

Hence our fun with Ænigma.

Bridget96, I guess there's not much (A)nu under the sun:

wordsmith
(Chief)
Mon May 15 08:15:40 2000
Words about words

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It's another of those words that go out of their way not to apply to
themselves. If today's word were to practice what it preaches we would be
seeing a leaner, meaner version of it, one that would be more suitable for
Scrabble, and save two keystrokes. How does haplogy sound? See you in a few
hundred years! In the meanwhile, look for more meta-words or words about
words in AWAD during this week.
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(I added the bold font above.)

i was tempted to mourn the fact that the one time i thought of something clever, it'd already been posted, but then it dawned on me that it was *anu* whose thinking i was mirroring.....