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JP essays a neologism: Qwertonym

I love this:

An aside. I was inordinately pleased to see that the BlackBerry predictive text support actually recognised the word foibles, even though it suggested doubles first. And how do I describe such words?. Surely there must be some word analogous to synonym and homonym that describes words thrown up as alternatives by predictive text systems. Qwertonym perhaps?

So: love, loud, and jove are qwertonyms, care of my Nokia 6310i, as are – appropriately – kiss & lips.

This could be great duo…

{ 7 } Comments

  1. Darren J Moffat | 2007/09/14 at 13:49 | Permalink

    “good” and “home” are the ones that catch me out on my Sony Ericsson K800i

  2. Chris Boyle | 2007/09/14 at 14:11 | Permalink

    Perplexcity.com had a puzzle based on these. I was particularly amused by smirnoff = poisoned and carling = barking.

  3. Dave Walker | 2007/09/14 at 14:24 | Permalink

    Nice one, JP – “qwertonym” actually *sounds* nice, even though the keypads used to produce them aren’t actually qwerty.

    There’s also a qwertonym which is bad for one’s health, by recommending spirits instead of ale; “pint” comes out as “shot”…

  4. Mel Rimmer | 2007/09/14 at 15:52 | Permalink

    A gay friend of mine loves telling people that “anal” and “cock” share a keysequence. Next time he tells the story I’ll use the word “qwertonym” and see if I can help spread the meme.

    There’s a joke in there somewhere about sexually transmitted viruses which I leave as an exercise to the reader.

  5. Steve | 2007/09/14 at 16:39 | Permalink

    ‘Fancy a shot/pint/riot’ makes me laugh every time i type it.

  6. Mike Smith | 2007/09/14 at 18:11 | Permalink

    Apparently the word textonyms is commonly used to describe them.
    I think they are really book!

  7. Clive | 2007/09/14 at 18:34 | Permalink

    I’m sure I posted about this kind of thing a few years ago and someone provided a perl script to find the largest group of qwertonyms.

    But I can’t find it any more. )-8

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