English

Alternative forms

• kakography

Noun

cacography ‎(countable and uncountable, plural cacographies)

1. Bad spelling or punctuation, especially unintuitive spellings considered as a feature of a whole language or dialect. [from 16th c.]
   • 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.

2. Poor or illegible handwriting. [from 17th c.]
   • 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