Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings/Repetitions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It is easy to to accidentally type a word twice and not notice it, particularly if the word is a short one. Common typos of this kind include:

Absolute duplicates

• a a
• about about
• an an
• and and
• are are
• be be
• by by
• for for
• he he
• if if
• in in
• is is
• it it
• of of
• she she
• the the
• this this
• to to
• was was
• were were
• when when
• with with

Note also places where a word appears twice separated by a punctuation mark.

Note that "had had" and "that that" can often be correct (see pluperfect).

Near duplicates

• a an
• an a
• a the
• the this
• this the
• this that

Other strange couples

• was been

Normally hyphenated expressions

• out-and-out
• out-of-door
• out-of-doors
• out-of-the-way
• out-of-band
• out-of-bounds
• out-of-town
• out-of-state
• out-of-wedlock
• out-of-pocket
• out-of-order
• out-of-place
• part-time
• full-time
• (n)-year-old
• right-handed
• left-handed
• case-sensitive
• case-insensitive
• award-winning
• out-of-body

Note that the hyphenation of an expression is subject to its context (see hyphen).

[edit] Most frequent duplicates

The following is a list of the 172 most common word duplicates (number after word is count of occurrences) extracted from a search of all English Wikipedia articles existing on 21 February 2006.

Most punctuation was automatically removed and so the count is unlikely to be 100% accurate. The count of single letter words is likely to be significantly affected by markup/punctuation removal and these have not been included on the list.

Some of these words occur in a context where duplication is intended, such as for emphasis please please, blah blah, Yadda Yadda Very Very, where the scientific name of an animal coincides with the common name Gorilla gorilla, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, where the Genus and subgenus have the same name Octopus Octopus, or even part of the name for example Pago Pago, Dum Dum, Duran Duran, Wagga Wagga, Walla Walla, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; Or a town or city in a county, state or country of the same name Oxford, Oxfordshire, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

The city of Luxembourg in orange is part of the Canton of Luxembourg, (add red) in the district of Luxembourg (add dark grey) in the country of Luxembourg (add light grey)

[edit] Most frequent duplicate word pairs

The following is a list of the 100 most common word pair duplicates (number after word is count of occurrences) extracted from a search of all English Wikipedia articles existing on 21 February 2006.