Etymology

eye dialect

Today it means: Nonstandard spellings which, although they indicate a standard pronunciation, are deliberately substituted in place of the standard spellings, often to indicate that a speaker's regular use of language is nonstandard or dialectal. Full definition →

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The story

From eye + dialect, by analogy with eye rhyme. First used by George Philip Krapp in The English Language in America (1925) in reference to written dialogue that uses nonstandard spelling but does not indicate an unusual pronunciation.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.