Dittography is the accidental, erroneous act of repeating a letter, word, phrase or combination of letters by a scribe or copyist. The term is used in the field of

textual criticism Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts (mss) or of printed books. Such texts may rang ...

, especially in critical studies of ancient or

biblical literature A biblical canon is a set of texts (also called "books") which a particular Jewish or Christian religious community regards as part of the Bible. The English word ''canon'' comes from the Greek , meaning ' rule' or ' measuring stick'. The use ...

. The opposite phenomenon, in which a copyist omits text by skipping from a word or phrase to a similar word or phrase further on, is known as

haplography Haplography (from Greek: haplo- 'single' + -graphy 'writing'), also known as lipography (from Greek: lip- from leipein 'to leave/to omit' + -graphy 'writing'), is a scribal error, scribal or typographical error where a letter or group of letters th ...

Example

Papyrus 98 Papyrus 98 (in the Gregory–Aland numbering), designated by 𝔓98, is an early copy of the New Testament in Greek. It is a papyrus manuscript of the Book of Revelation. The manuscript palaeographically had been assigned to years around 150– ...

in Rev 1:13 has instead of (doubled μ). The

Codex Vaticanus The Codex Vaticanus ( The Vatican, Bibl. Vat., Vat. gr. 1209), is a manuscript of the Greek Bible, containing the majority of the Old Testament and the majority of the New Testament. It is designated by siglum B or 03 in the Gregory-Aland numb ...

repeats the word in John 13:14. The phrase "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" appears twice in Acts 19:34 in the Codex Vaticanus, while it only appears once in other manuscripts.

References

Proofreading Textual criticism Textual scholarship {{ling-stub