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 or

typographical error A typographical error (often shortened to typo), also called a misprint, is a mistake (such as a spelling or transposition error) made in the typing of printed or electronic material. Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual typesettin ...

where a letter or group of letters that should be written twice is written once. It is not to be confused with

haplology Haplology (from Greek "simple" and , "speech") is, in spoken language, the elision (elimination or deletion) of an entire syllable or a part of it through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). Th ...

, where a phoneme is omitted to prevent two similar sounds from occurring consecutively: the former is a textual error, while the latter is a phonological process. In English, a common haplographical mistake is the rendering of consecutive letters between

morphemes A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

as a single letter. Many

commonly misspelled words Commonly misspelled English words ( UK: misspelt words) are words that are often unintentionally misspelled in general writing. A selected list of common words is presented below, under '' Documented list of common misspellings''. Although the wo ...

have this form. For example, ''misspell'' is often misspelled as . The etymology of the word ''misspell'' is the affix "mis-" plus the root "spell", their bound morpheme has two consecutive ''s''s, one of which is often erroneously omitted. The reverse phenomenon, in which a copyist inadvertently repeats a portion of text, is known as

dittography 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, especially in critical studies of ancient or biblical literature ...

. Other examples of words liable to be written haplographically in different languages are: German ''Rollladen'' ("shutters", from ''roll'' + ''Laden'') which requires an uncommon sequence of three ''l''‘s and is often spelt , or Arabic ''takyīf'' ("air conditioning"), which would require a sequence of two semivowels ''y'' (one as a true semivowel, and another as a device to mark long ''ī'') and is often misspelt as ''takīf'' , with only one. The term ''haplography'' is commonly 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 ...

to refer to the phenomenon of a scribe's, copyist's or translator's inadvertently skipping from one word or phrase to a similar word or phrase further on in the text, and omitting everything in between.This usage can be seen at It is considered to be a form of parablepsis.

References

Textual scholarship Typography Biblical criticism Proofreading Textual criticism {{Ling-stub