mondegreen

English

WOTD – 30 June 2006

Etymology

Coined by American author and editor Sylvia Wright in 1954 in Harper's Magazine[1] from a mishearing of a line in the Scottish ballad The Bonnie Earl O' Moray: “They have slain the Earl O' Moray, / And laid him on the green” (misheard as “Lady Mondegreen”).

Pronunciation

enPR: mŏnd′əgrēn
(UK) IPA^(key): /ˈmɒndəɡɹiːn/
(US) IPA^(key): /ˈmɑndəɡɹiːn/
Audio (US) (file)

Noun

Examples (mishearing)

“The ants are my friends, blowin’ in the wind.” (“The answer, my friend, is...”) from Bob Dylan's “Blowin' In the Wind.”
“There's a bathroom on the right” (“There's a bad moon on the rise”) from Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Bad Moon Rising.”
“'Scuse me while I kiss this guy” (“'Scuse me while I kiss the sky”) from Jimi Hendrix's “Purple Haze.”
“Andy walks with me…” (“And He walks with me…”) from the hymn “In The Garden”
“Our Father, Who art in Heaven, Harold be Thy name…” (“…hallowed be thy name…”) from the Lord’s Prayer

mondegreen (plural mondegreens)

(linguistics) A form of error arising from mishearing a spoken or sung phrase. [from 1954]
Synonym: mishearing
- 2012, Gary Rosen, Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein, Oxford University Press, →ISBN:
  The title lyric, the only part of the original Yiddish preserved by Cahn, was a mondegreen waiting to happen—“My Mere Bits of Shame” and “My Beer, Mr. Shane” were among the earliest recorded mishearings—but the language barrier didn't […]
(rare) A misunderstanding of a written or spoken phrase as a result of multiple definitions.

Coordinate terms

catachresis
eggcorn
malapropism

Translations

mishearing

Dutch: mondegreen (nl), mama appelsap (nl)
Finnish: väärin kuuleminen
German: Verhörer (de) m
Indonesian: salah dengar
Japanese: 空耳 (soramimi)
Polish: przesłyszenie n
Portuguese: tiocidade (pt) f (Portugal), virundum m (Brazil)
Russian: ослы́шка (ru) f (oslýška)
Spanish: pomporruta f

References

Sylvia Wright (November 1954), “The Death of Lady Mondegreen”, in Harper's Magazine‎, volume 209, issue 1254, pages 48–51: “The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for them, is that they are better than the original.”