An example of an eggcorn. A café chalkboard where the French term prix fixe (fixed price) has been altered to prefixed.
7 October 2022
An eggcorn is an example of a type of folk etymology where the listener re-analyzes an unfamiliar word or phrase by changing it to something similar that is more familiar sounding. It is the alteration of a word or phrase to make it seem more sensical. Hence acorn becomes eggcorn or asparagus becomes sparrow-grass.
The linguistic term eggcorn, as opposed to the folk-etymology eggcorn for acorn, was coined by linguist Geoffrey Pullum in response to a 23 September 2003 post by Mark Liberman on the Language Log blog:
Chris Potts has told me about a case in which a woman wrote “egg corns” for “acorns.” This might be taken to be a folk etymology, like “Jerusalem” for “girasole” in “Jerusalem artichoke” (a kind of sunflower). But it might also be treated as something like a mondegreen […] the kind of “slip of the ear” that is especially common in learning songs and poems. Finally, it's also something like a malapropism, where a word is mistakenly substituted for one of similar sound shape.
Although the example is somewhat like each of these three named categories of errors, it's not exactly any of them. Can anyone suggest a better term?
Within a week, Pullum had suggested that they be called simply eggcorns. The name stuck.
As for the folk etymology, people have been calling acorns eggcorns since at least 1844, when a line from a 16 June 1844 letter by an S.G. McMahan reads:
I hope you are harty as you ust to be that you have plenty of egg corn bread which I cann not get her and I hope to help you eat some of it soon.
Other examples of eggcorns include:
Old-timer’s disease for Alzheimer’s disease
Cold slaw for cole slaw
Mute point for moot point
One fowl swoop for one fell swoop
Cf. crash blossom.
Sources:
Liberman, Mark. “Egg Corns: Folk Etymology, Malapropism, Mondegreen, ???.” Language Log (blog), 23 September 2003, updated 30 September 2003.
McMahan, S.G. Extract from a 16 June 1844 letter. In Albert L. Hurtado. John Sutter: A Life on the North American Frontier. Norman: U of Oklahoma Press, 2006, 130.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, November 2010, s.v. eggcorn, n.
Photo credit: Desultrix, 2011. Licensed by a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.