A specific spelling of a word representing a phonetic feature never present in it, but was present in other words in the same phonetic environment (and was later lost), or the practice of making such spellings.
1996, Eric Gerald Stanley, “Late Copies of Anglo-Saxon Charters”, in Studies in English Language & Literature: "doubt Wisely" : Papers in Honour of E.G. Stanley, page 55:
For example, in D and w, e is a possible reflex for OE y: (29) cysan, presumably a back-spelling for cesen < ceosen, and (40) hylle, a back-spelling for helle.
1997, Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change[1], page 63:
Another very important type is hypercorrect or inverse spelling (Rückschreibung, backspelling). Here a segment that has been lost or altered is spelled in the 'wrong' environment, suggesting that the writer knows that some words have it by convention, but not precisely which.
2016, Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Languages in Contact in the Latin East”, in Crusades[2], volume 1, page 173:
The absence of the epenthetic consonant in ⲖⲈⲬⲞⲨⲬⲞⲨⲘⲈⲢⲈ lekhukhumere seems to reflect a phenomenon of backspelling.
