back-spelling

alternative backspelling

1. An unetymological, often hypercorrect, spelling of a word created by analogy with other words which (usually through loss of a sound or its phonetic merger with other sounds) have become similar to it.

   Modern English numb is a back-spelling, because this word never had a /b/ in it. The back-spelling is based on words such as lamb, which had once ended in /b/, but where this sound was lost and the letter b became silent.

   3 more examples

   For example, in D and w, e is a possible reflex for OE y: (29) cysan, presumably a back-spelling for cesen < ceosen, and (40) hylle, a back-spelling for helle.

   1996, Eric Gerald Stanley, “Late Copies of Anglo-Saxon Charters”, in Studies in English Language & Literature: "doubt Wisely" : Papers in Honour of E.G. Stanley, page 55

   Another very important type is hypercorrect or inverse spelling (Rückschreibung, backspelling). Here a segment that has been lost or altered is spelled in the 'wrong' environment, suggesting that the writer knows that some words have it by convention, but not precisely which.

   1997, Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, page 63

   The absence of the epenthetic consonant in ⲖⲈⲬⲞⲨⲬⲞⲨⲘⲈⲢⲈ lekhukhumere seems to reflect a phenomenon of backspelling.

   2016, Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Languages in Contact in the Latin East”, in Crusades, volume 1, page 173

   Synonyms: inverse spelling