Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Epipany, Epihany, etc. (for Epiphany)

January 6th is Epiphany, the festival celebrated in the Christian Church to commemorate the first manifestation of Jesus Christ to the people.

Epiphany marks the end of the 12 Days of Christmas, and while catalogers typing may sound like the 12 precise drummers drumming, a slip of the fingers can leave you with several permutations of the word.

Typos for Epiphany include the low probability misspellings Epipany, Ephipany, or Epihany, all occurring fewer than 10 times in Worldcat. The higher probability Epiphan, which garners 136 hits in Worldcat, is not always a typo: the misspelling seems to double as a male given name.

Leanne Olson

(Illustration from the 12 Days of Christmas photostream at Flickr)

2 comments:

Fran said...

It looks like the second typo you list (Epiphany) is the correct spelling of the word. Am I missing something, or did your spell checker automatically correct a different spelling?

librarytypos said...

Thanks, Fran--looks like the spell checker slipped one by me! It was supposed to be "Ephipany" and I've fixed it now.

I appreciate your keen eyes!

Leanne