An eggcorn is the alteration of a phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements,[1] creating a new phrase having a different meaning from the original but which still makes sense and is plausible when used in the same context.[2] The autological word "eggcorn" is itself an eggcorn, derived from acorn. Eggcorns often arise as people attempt to make sense of a stock phrase that uses a term unfamiliar to them,[3] as for example replacing "Alzheimer's disease" with "old-timers' disease",[2] or William Shakespeare's "to the manner born" with "to the manor born".[1]
Eggcorns arise when people attempt to use analogy and logic to make sense of an expression – often a stock one – that includes a term which is not meaningful to them.[3] For example, the stock expression "in one fell swoop" might be replaced by "in one foul swoop", the infrequently-used adjective "fell" (for "fierce", "cruel", or "terrible"[4]) being replaced with the more common word "foul" in order to convey the cruel/underhand meaning of the phrase as the speaker understands it.[3]
Eggcorns are of interest to linguists as they not only show language changing in real time, but can also shed light on how and why the change occurs.[3]
The term egg corn (later contracted into one word, eggcorn) was coined by professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum in September 2003 in response to an article by Mark Liberman on the website Language Log, a group blog for linguists.[5] In his article, Liberman discussed the case of a woman who had used the phrase egg corn for acorn, and he noted that this specific type of substitution lacked a name. Pullum suggested using egg corn itself as a label.[6]
Eggcorns are similar to but distinct from several other linguistic expressions:[21]
Where the spoken form of an eggcorn sounds the same as the original, it becomes a type of homophone.
