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Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings/Doppelgangers

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a misspelling of more than one word

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In the Typos that need to be corrected section, it says "a misspelt word could be a misspelling of more than one word". This was added by User:Tabletop with this edit on 12:34, 16 May 2013. I think I kind of know what is meant here but I'm blanking on a good pedagogical example. Even better would be a few wiki diffs of actual examples found in practice. Tabletop, can you think of a good example we could give? Jason Quinn (talk) 07:46, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@Jason Quinn: I tackled "beared" a while back, which had to be changed to bearded, bearer, bears, bore or borne. -- John of Reading (talk) 08:58, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, John of Reading. Perhaps we will use this as the example. Jason Quinn (talk) 17:13, 7 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Misspelling of more than one word (ambiguous)

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Here are some examples:

  • achived (achieved, archived)
  • ackward (awkward, backward)
  • Tansania (Tanzania, Tasmania) (z & s; n & m; are pairs of similar letters) :-)
  • Dakka (Dakar, Dacca, Dhaka) (Capital city of their respective country, plus one old spelling).

Care has to be taken to choose the correct correction. Since the first and last letters and most of the intermediate letters are the same, the wrong correction are probably more likely with

  • Whole language which read the word in one go, as compared to
  • Phonics which reads the word letter by letter, left to right.
  • Example: "Bill and Melinda Gates donate $300m to Tasmania, where there is no malaria, instead of to Tanzania, where there is malaria."

Perhaps a separate list of ambiguous spelling errors could be derived from Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings? Tabletop (talk) 04:24, 13 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Suggested title change: "Misspelt words with more than one plausible corrections". Tabletop (talk) 04:48, 13 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Super, Tabletop! Those are all very good examples. We'll probably end up using one or two of those as the example. Perhaps headings like "Misspelt words requiring context to fix" or "Misspelt words for which the correction requires context" is even clearer? Jason Quinn (talk) 13:59, 13 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Suggested title should start with "Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings", such as

False friends are words, particularly of foreign languages, that have true meanings different from what one might expect.

Doppelgangers are lookalikes which can be used to throw you off the scent, a potential bodyguard.

Pairs such as Tanzania and Tasmania are a bit of a mixture of False friends and Doppelgangers. These words could reduce "Requiring context to fix" to a single word. :-)

Thus Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings (doppelgangers). Tabletop (talk) 10:06, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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As a general rule, pairs or groups of Doppelgänger words should all consist of correctly spelled words,

The Doppelgänger page does not yet mention Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings/Doppelgangers.

What does Jason Quinn think of this? Tabletop (talk) 11:02, 14 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Tabletop. Sorry I haven't been responding. Real life has been too busy and I've barely been editing at all. Even right now I need to do something else so I can't spend much time on this at the moment. You are listing a bunch of interesting information and I like the idea of a list of these sorts of of words. Perhaps this could be WP:Adopt a typo could be a place to mention this stuff as well. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:48, 19 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Rubric

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It is sometimes said that so long as the first and last letter of a word are the same, it does not really matter what order the intermediate letters are, in order to understand that word. Well, this saying starts to fall flat with the pair of doppelganger words such as Tanzania and Tasmania). Here the letters "s" & "z" and "n" and "m" are False Friends. CONTEXT NEEDED to choose the right word. QED. Tabletop (talk) 04:02, 15 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Examples

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A

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B

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  • bite, bight - a "bight" is a landform that looks a bit like a "bite" has been bitten out of that landform; such as the Great Australian Bight.
    • in about 1980, a campaign was instituted in the computer press, to adopt the word and spelling byte for 8 bits.
  • bite, bight, byte. Now there are three.
  • Bellingen town on Bellinger River ; different spelling due to poor handwriting ; "n" and "r" are similar when scanned, or handwritten.

D

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G

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J

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M

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P

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  • pair, pear and pare are words with similar spelling and pronunciation, but quite different meanings.
    • countless spelling reformers would probably wish to have the three words pair, pear and pare spelled the same as they are pronounced the same. This would be counterproductive as it would be harder to distinguish their different meanings.
    • Consider "a triplet of pears pared to a pair of pears."
    • Reform it to "A triplet of pears peared to a pear of pears," which is much harder to understand.
  • person, poison ; mistake made by scanning software processing old newspapers.
    • "e" is round partially inked in.
    • "o" is round . . . not inked in.
    • "i" is short vertical line.
    • "r" is short vertical line with small tick mark.

R

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  • (Row, How) - "R" & "H" similar
  • Row like "Cow" - an argument
  • Row like "blow" - row a boat
  • How like "Cow"

S

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T

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Hi, Tabletop. To merely link to Wictionary, use two, to, too. The template {{Interlanguage link multi}} can be add additional links to other projects in the event that the link to Wikipedia does not exist: shadow vs stupendous [wiktionary]. I'm not sure off the top of my head how to have a single link choose between them depending on the existence of a Wikipedia article and I didn't find any template to do just that. Might still be one or perhaps the code to the previous template could be modified to do it. Jason Quinn (talk) 09:32, 23 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]
    • Think of a sentence that uses these three words.
    • Jack went to room two, and Jill went to two too. :-)

Scanning errors

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The following pairs or groups of genuine words were encountered when editing scanning errors, particularly of old 19th Century newspapers.

B

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D

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F

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  • (fail, fall) - "i" and "l" are rather similar on old poor quality newsprint.
  • (Fell, Pell) - "F" and "P" are rather similar too.

H

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N

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S

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  • (Slice, Shoe) - "li" and "h"; "c" and "o".
  • (Spilt, Split) - "il" and "li" transposed; "i" and "l" also "false friends".
  • Wiktionary lists split and spilt as anagrams
  • Wiktionary does NOT include a sentence containing both split and split.

T

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  • (test, teat) - "s" and "a" similar size; also adjacent keys.

W

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  • ( Wind (weather) and Wind (up a clock)). Two valid words with same spelling; different pronunciation and meaning.
  • Wind (weather) as in "win".
  • Wind (up a clock) as in "wine".

Miscellaneous

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  • The template on page "Dakar" {{Distinguish|Dhaka}} causes the warning message to appear usually at the top of a Wiki article, thus
    Not to be confused with Dhaka.
    .
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