cacography
Appearance
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From caco- + -graphy, perhaps after Middle French cacographie.
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]cacography (countable and uncountable, plural cacographies)
- Bad spelling or punctuation, especially unintuitive spellings considered as a feature of a whole language or dialect. [from 16th c.]
- Antonym: orthography
- 1846, Gabriel Surenne, A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric, IV.4.1:
- A phrase exhibits proofs of cacography, when the accents are misplaced, forgotten, or used erroneously.
- 1999 February 25, Jack Schofield, The Guardian:
- In 1997, two American entrepreneurs, Robert Hoffer and Timothy Kay, formed a company called Typo.net to try to profit from Web surfers' cacography.
- Deliberate comic misspelling; malapropism.
- 2003, Onwuchekwa Jemie, editor, Yo' Mama!, page 10:
- The soul of dialect is cacography, the deliberate misspelling of words for comic effect, which is the written equivalent of the malapropism.
- Poor or illegible handwriting. [from 17th c.]
- Antonym: calligraphy
- 1904, John Rexford, What Handwriting Indicates, pages 90–91:
- Many illegible letters is the sign of disorder, and the illegibility of Greeley's cacography has furnished numberless anecdotes.
- 2002 June 29, Mil Millington, The Guardian:
- Germans write a "1" so it's easy to confuse it with a "7": mathematics and cacography can leave Margret and I not speaking to each other for a week.
- 2010, Martin L. Buxbaum, Negotiations with the Sniper: Book One, page 63:
- I don't even recognize the handwriting – kind of a scrawled, almost illegible cacography with the letters slanting haphazardly in all directions.
Derived terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]Translations
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See also
[edit]Categories:
- English terms prefixed with caco-
- English terms suffixed with -graphy
- English terms calqued from Middle French
- English terms derived from Middle French
- English 4-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- Rhymes:English/ɒɡɹəfi
- Rhymes:English/ɒɡɹəfi/4 syllables
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English uncountable nouns
- English countable nouns
- English terms with quotations
- en:Writing