Friday, November 14, 2008

Ibliography (for Bibliography)


Typos at the beginning of a word are rare because they are much more salient than typos within a word. This is a typo for the word "bibliography." The initial B is not present. This is not a common typo, with only three occurrences in OhioLINK, the typo reference database, but few words with initial typos are. We see them more easily than we see other typos. They stand out and we fix them. This typo occurs only 37 times in WorldCat.org.

Speaking of WorldCat, the picture above shows a screenshot from OCLC Connexion. It shows an alphabetical browse display. This display was generated doing the search "scan tiw=ibliography".It shows the word bibliography (and its foreign language equivalent) missing the initial B. Alphabetical browse displays can be very helpful in identifying typos because headings with typos in them tend to "float" to the bottom or top of alphabetical displays, separate from the other lines that are spelled correctly.

Picture: http://www.flickr.com/photos/denverjeffrey/2969746531/

Jeffrey Beall

1 comment:

Unknown said...

i bet at least one of these is a case of "βibliography", as we're an ohiolink member:

http://holmes.lib.muohio.edu/record=b2410480

http://olc1.ohiolink.edu/record=b17697144