Wednesday, December 26, 2007

December 26, 2007 - Hunderd, etc. (for Hundred)

Among the most numerous of typos are types of numbers, from scores of tortured –teens to four– for for– (and vice versa). And, while there may not be hundreds of ways to misspell the word hundred, there were, at last count, at least seven of them in OhioLINK, including Hundered, Hunded, Hunderd, Hundrd, Hundrerd, Hundrere*, and Hundrr*, which range from "high" to "lowest probability" on the Ballard list. In The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes, Wanda Petronski insists she has "a hundred dresses, all lined up" at home in her closet. And, like many a puzzling paradox, she both doesn't and does. (Drawing by Louis Slobodkin, 1944.)

Carol Reid

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