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 of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in ...

. 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, is a scribal or typographical error where a letter or group of letters that should be written twice is written once. It is not to be confused with haplology, wh ...

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 150–250. ...

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

Codex Vaticanus The Codex Vaticanus ( The Vatican, Bibl. Vat., Vat. gr. 1209), designated by siglum B or 03 (in the Gregory-Aland numbering), δ 1 ( von Soden), is a fourth-century Christian manuscript of a Greek Bible, containing the majority of the Greek Old ...

in John 13:14 word is repeated twice. In Codex Vaticanus in

Acts The Acts of the Apostles ( grc-koi, Πράξεις Ἀποστόλων, ''Práxeis Apostólōn''; la, Actūs Apostolōrum) is the fifth book of the New Testament; it tells of the founding of the Christian Church and the spread of its message ...

, a book of the

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...

, verse 19:34, the phrase "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" appears twice while it only appears once in other manuscripts.

References

Proofreading Textual criticism Textual scholarship {{ling-stub