Haplography (from Greek: haplo- 'single' + -graphy 'writing'), also known as lipography, is a

scribal A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing. The profession of the scribe, previously widespread across cultures, lost most of its promi ...

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

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 through dissimilation (a differentiating shift that affects two neighboring similar sounds). The phenomenon was ...

, 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 the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...

as a single letter. Many commonly misspelled words 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 opposite of haplography is

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. The opposite phenomenon, in which a copyist omits text by skipp ...

. 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 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 da ...

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