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Scrawl vs Cacography - What's the difference?

scrawl | cacography |

As nouns the difference between scrawl and cacography

is that scrawl is an irregular, possibly illegible handwriting while cacography is bad spelling or punctuation, especially unintuitive spellings considered as a feature of a whole language or dialect.

As a verb scrawl

is to write something hastily or illegibly or scrawl can be .

scrawl

English

Etymology 1

Possibly (etyl)

Noun

(en noun)
  • An irregular, possibly illegible handwriting.
  • A hastily, or carelessly written note etc.
  • Verb

    (en verb)
  • To write something hastily or illegibly.
  • To write in an irregular or illegible manner.
  • To write unskilfully and inelegantly.
  • * Milton
  • Though with a golden pen you scrawl .

    Etymology 2

    Verb

    (en verb)
  • (Latimer)
    (Webster 1913)

    Anagrams

    *

    cacography

    English

    Alternative forms

    *kakography

    Noun

  • Bad spelling or punctuation, especially unintuitive spellings considered as a feature of a whole language or dialect.
  • *1846 , Gabriel Surenne, A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric , IV.4.1:
  • *:A phrase exhibits proofs of cacography , when the accents are misplaced, forgotten, or used erroneously.
  • *1999 , Jack Schofield, The Guardian , 25 Feb 1999:
  • *:In 1997, two American entrepreneurs, Robert Hoffer and Timothy Kay, formed a company called Typo.net to try to profit from Web surfers' cacography .
  • *2003 , Onwuchekwa Jemie (ed.), Yo' Mama! , p. 10:
  • *:The soul of dialect is cacography , the deliberate misspelling of words for comic effect, which is the written equivalent of the malapropism.
  • Poor or illegible handwriting.
  • *1904 , John Rexford, What Handwriting Indicates , pp. 90-91:
  • *:Many illegible letters is the sign of disorder, and the illegibility of Greeley's cacography has furnished numberless anecdotes.
  • *2002 , Mil Millington, The Guardian , 29 Jun 2002:
  • *:Germans write a "1" so it's easy to confuse it with a "7": mathematics and cacography can leave Margret and I not speaking to each other for a week.
  • *2010 , Martin L. Buxbaum, Negotiations with the Sniper: Book One , p. 63:
  • *:I don't even recognize the handwriting – kind of a scrawled, almost illegible cacography with the letters slanting haphazardly in all directions.
  • Derived terms

    * cacographer * cacographic * cacographical

    Antonyms

    * (poor spelling system) orthography * (poor handwriting) calligraphy

    See also

    * illegible * indecipherable * indistinct * obscure * scrawled * unclear * undecipherable * unreadable