September 12, 2007 - Pricipal*

Pricipal*

28 results found recently at OhioLINK. Among the sinners, you'll find high school pricipals, pricipal investigators, a co-pricipal, pricipal author, pricipal performer, pricipal works, and so forth. You might have expected to find this typo pricipally in notes. Pricipalment occurs in a Catalan-language record, as well as typos in other languages. Errors in materials other than English are out of scope for this project, as a matter of-- policy!

This post is princpnally thanks to Sue Weiland of Ball State University, who on Monday questioned on OCLC-Cat why WorldCat's spell checker did not catch such a typo.

September 11, 2007 - Rhumatolog*

Rhumatolog*

35 results found recently at OhioLINK! Of which, 8 remained when the language was limited to English. 4 of these appear to be a MARC miscoding of the language. Only 1 of the 4 remaining records appears to have a typo, though. So this is a rare one.

September 10, 2007 - Federeal

Federeal

Three instances of this typo were found recently at OhioLINK. And yes, two of them are government documents! The third is a bank.

September 7, 2007 - Propogate

Propogate for propagate is another Highest Probability typo. If you use a truncated version propoga*, with the asterisk representing the wild card in your system, you will pick up propoganda along with the other forms of propagate.

U.S. propaganda poster from the National Archives.

September 6, 2007 - wth

As a typo for with, wth is on the Highest Probability A Section of the Ballard list. It also exists as an abbreviation for with (certainly not one that saves a lot of space) in the language of text messaging. As an acronym it stands for various firms, organizations, and a 2005 computer conference.

September 5, 2007 - Balitmore

Balitmore for Baltimore, a High Probability typo, shows up in the titles of several government documents in WorldCat, sometimes twice in the same line. Even more surprising is "Port of Baltimore, Balitmore County." Worth adding to a spell check if you prepare government reports in Maryland. Well worth checking your databases everywhere.

Female Baltimore Oriole - image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

September 4, 2007 - Mew York

Since there are some 90,000,000 cats in the United States (according to the late, lamented Google Answers), they are probably entitled to have their own city and state. Until it becomes official, Mew York is still a typo for New York. It resides on the High Probability B list.


Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. (The cat really has 4 legs!)