I discovered a interesting term today for misspellings, missed words and other mistakes in a text – printer’s devils. This term originally referred to apprentices working in print shops who did things like mixing ink and fetching type. The origins of the term are uncertain, but printers believed that their shops were haunted by a particular type of devil who made mischief by misspelling words, setting type the wrong way round, and making words and whole lines go missing [source].
So if you spot any mistakes on Omniglot, maybe the printer’s devils have been up to their old tricks.
