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What is the term for "overlooking words with letters written in reverse"?

English Language & Usage Asked by AsianRyanReynolds on November 6, 2021

If I recall correctly, there is a term in English which refers to the phenomenon /behavior where people are unable to tell, at a glance or when skimming through an article, a misspelled word because the vowels were spelled in reverse, it’s not quite “dyslexic” but I couldn’t at all think of that word.

Here’s an example:

At a glance, it’s kind of difficult to tell “miosturizer” from a whole paragraph of words. It’s very possible people would read through it without noticing this spelling error.

Similarly, “auteocism” would be passed off as correct, if one does not sift through an article word by word meticuluosly.

What is this phenomenon called?

One Answer

Wikipedia has the neologism Typoglycemia, but it is not used in psycholinguistic research (as it is a rather strange construct).

Typoglycemia is a neologism for a purported recent discovery about the cognitive processes behind reading written text. The word appears to be a portmanteau of "typo", as in typographical error, and "hypoglycemia".

The standard example is this:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe

It has been pointed out that the word cannot be completly random, some order must be retained, for the reader to reconstruct the meaning. See http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

Answered by Stefan on November 6, 2021

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