Friday, April 18, 2008

Athelete (for Athlete)

Athelete can be found on the B or High Probability section of Typographical Errors in Library Databases at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html . This means that the error had at least 16 hits in OhioLINK at the time of its discovery. This seems to be the sort of typo generated by the fact that somebody didn't know how to spell the word, and the proofreader was thinking about something else - perhaps last night's baseball. There are only 42 hits for athelete in WorldCat, but a large percentage of these are in the title - the worst sort of error. Google has more than 300,000 atheletes, but of course you can only see the first 1000. Today's picture shows Mets 3rd baseman David Wright circling the bases after landing one over the right field wall.

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