mondegreen
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A mondegreen () is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray", and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".
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Article
36 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- Psychology
- Examples
- In songs
- Standardized and recorded mondegreens
- In literature
- In film
- In television
- In video games
- Other notable examples
- Notable collections
- Reverse mondegreen
- Deliberate mondegreen
- Related linguistic phenomena
- Non-English languages
- Croatian and Serbian
- Czech
- Dutch
- French
- German
- Hebrew
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Japanese
- Mandarin
- Polish
- Russian
- Slovak
- Spanish
- Yiddish
- See also
- Notes and references
- Explanatory notes
- Citations
- Further reading
- External links
A mondegreen () is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning. Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense. The American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, recalling a childhood memory of her mother reading the Scottish ballad "The Bonnie Earl o' Moray", and mishearing the words "laid him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen".
"Mondegreen" was included in the 2000 edition of the ''Random House Webster's College Dictionary, and in the Oxford English Dictionary'' in 2002. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary added the word in 2008.