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Stan Carey @StanCarey
, 5 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
Why do we stand on our tiptoes and not our toetips?
I've been avoiding Twitter but where else am I going to ask these vital questions about wonky morphology
OED says "tiptoes" goes back to Chaucer: "He moste wynke … And stonden on his tiptoon" [also typton, typtoon, typtoos, tiptos]. Nothing on "toetips" 🤔
I like this idea a lot in principle, but the plural noun predates the verb by almost three centuries, if the OED has it right. #tiptoes #toetips
This seems a plausible reason that it's "tiptoes" and not "toetips". Haplology, eggcorn, reanalysis.
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