A typographical error (often shortened to typo) is a mistake made in, originally, the manual type-setting (typography) of printed material, or more recently, the typing process. The term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger,[1] but usually excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors. Before the arrival of printing, the "copyist's mistake" or "scribal error" was the equivalent for manuscripts. Most typos involve simple duplication, omission, transposition, or substitution of a small number of characters.
The term fat finger, often in combination with "fat-finger syndrome", is used as slang to refer to the invocation of a unwanted secondary action due to (a) one's finger being bigger than the envisioned touch zone, or (b) accidental inaccuracy in the fine motor movements of one's extremities. In general terms, for example, pressing a different button than expected on a touchscreen, or hitting two adjacent keys on a keyboard in a single keystroke during data entry (for example, buckled instead of bucked due to the adjacency of the L key to the K key on many keyboards). Especially in light of the trend in e.g. mobile phones always getting smaller, the etymology for the fat finger term may root in the fact that users with naturally-grown big fingers, as well as obese users, are one of the first groups to run into problems of this miniaturization.
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Certain typos, or kinds of typos, have achieved widespread notoriety and are occasionally used deliberately for humorous purposes. For instance, the British newspaper The Guardian is sometimes referred to as The Grauniad due to its reputation for frequent typesetting errors in the era before computer typesetting.[2] This usage began as a running joke in the satirical magazine Private Eye.[3] The magazine continues to refer to The Guardian by this name to this day.
Typos are common on the internet in chatrooms, Usenet and the World Wide Web and some, such as "teh", "pwned", and "pron" have become in-jokes among Internet groups and subcultures.[4]
Typosquatting is a form of cybersquatting which relies on typographical errors made by users of Internet.[5] Typically, the cybersquatter will register a plausible typo of a well-known website address in hopes of receiving traffic when Internet users mistype that address into a web browser. Deliberately introducing typos into a web page, or into its metadata, can also draw unwitting visitors when they enter these typos in Internet search engines.
Since the emergence and popularization of online auction sites such as eBay, misspelled auction searches have quickly become a gold mine for deal hunters.[6] The concept on which these searches are based is that if an individual posts an auction and misspells its description and/or title, regular searches will not find this auction. However, a search which includes misspelled alterations of the original search term in such a way as to create misspellings, transpositions, omissions, double strikes, and wrong key errors would find most misspelled auctions. The resulting effect is that there are far fewer bids than there would be under normal circumstances allowing for the searcher to obtain the item for less. A series of third party web sites have sprung up allowing people to find these items.[7]
When using a typewriter without correction tape, typos are commonly overstruck with another character such as a slash. This saves the typist the trouble of retyping the entire page to eliminate the error, but as evidence of the typo remains, it is not aesthetically pleasing.
In instant messaging, users often send messages in haste and only afterwards notice the typo. It is common practice to correct the typo by sending a subsequent message where an asterisk precedes or follows the correct word.[8]
In such forms of teleprinter that have no backspace or delete key (particularly those that use Baudot code), an error that is caught immediately will be followed by 'X' repeated a few times, as a sort of representation of the mistake being exed out, with the correct spelling following, for example:
In formal prose it is sometimes necessary to quote accurately text containing typos. In such cases, the author will write "[sic]" to indicate that an error was in the original quoted source rather than in the transcription.[9]
A thumbo is a typographical error made during thumb typing, especially on the keypads of cellphones and smartphones. With minimal spacing in between alphabets on thumbing keypads, one tends to type wrong letters, thus the error. The word is a portmanteau of "thumb" and "typo".[10]