jbm blog

The Heigth Virus

Spend any amount of time discussing the physical dimensions of objects and sooner or later you’re going to hear someone say ‘heigth’ when of course they mean ‘height’. It looks so obviously wrong in print that I’m having a hard time typing it, but I must otherwise I cannot make my point.

In my experience, the error is prevalent among people who measure things frequently, such as contractors or furniture makers. I suppose they say ‘length, width, depth and breadth’ and assume that all dimension names end in ‘th’.

The surprising thing is the way the error has taken off over the past decade, spreading like a virus. I estimate that a minority of people still say it correctly. They must have corrected their pronunciation to match that they were hearing frequently. Thus the mistake is passed from person to person and quickly looks like an epidemic.

I fear that within a decade dictionaries will be forced to adopt the error as it’s use will be too common to ignore.

At least it will go on record that I fougth it.