Thursday, March 17, 2011

Nuculear* (for Nuclear*)

This has been a very sad week for Japan. The tragedy of the great physical devastation by the earthquake and tsunami has been exacerbated by the damage caused to one of the nuclear plants there. Nuclear is, of course, also a frequently mispronounced word, and today's typo, nuculear, is basically a transcription of the most popular mispronunciation (it could also be spelled nucular).

Nuculear* is a very low-probability typo. It only occurs once in OhioLINK (although that is in a subject heading) and 8 times in WorldCat, but given the fact that nuclear energy is on everyone's mind, this is a great time to clean up this small disaster in our catalogs.

Liz Bodian
Chicago Public Library

Image of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant from Wikipedia, under Creative Commons license

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