Whence cometh "Vicotr"?
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From time to time, people of all nationalities mistype my given name as "Vicotr". The weird thing is that I myself fairly often mistype my name that way.
Surely I and the people who write to me know how to spell and pronounce my name. So why does this mistyping happen so often?
It garners nearly 50,000 hits on Google. You can find "Vicotr Hugo" and "RCA Vicotr" online.
There's a website called Names.org that has a long page for "Vicotr", you will find a great deal of information about "Vicotr", including how to pronounce it. If you push the "play" buttons on this site, the automated male and female voices will dutifully pronounce "Vicotr" for you.
Not only that, this site obligingly provides the following "Fun Facts about the name Vicotr":
- When was the first name Vicotr first recorded in the United States? The oldest recorded birth by the Social Security Administration for the name Vicotr is Tuesday, October 29th, 1878.*
- How unique is the name Vicotr? From 1880 to 2023 less than 5 people per year have been born with the first name Vicotr. Hoorah! You are a unique individual.
- Weird things about the name Vicotr: The name spelled backwards is Rtociv. A random rearrangement of the letters in the name (anagram) will give Ircovt. How do you pronounce that?
*QWERTY was invented in 1874. One of my forthcoming posts will be about QWERTY, and will include some facts that you almost certainly didn't know about it.
I have a theory about why this particular mistyping is so common. I will share it after a couple of days if no one else figures it out convincingly.
Selected readings
- "Lapsus digiti" (7/23/19) — see especially the last two comments
- "The weirdness of typing errors" (3/14/22) –with a lengthy, instructive video
Chris Button said,
April 5, 2025 @ 6:55 am
Random typos aside, I would say because Vicotr is obstruent-sonorant-obstruent-sonorant-obstruent-sonorant.
Carin said,
April 5, 2025 @ 7:18 am
I do something similar, mistyping my own name as CAIRN as often as not. My theory: my hands intuitively want to alternate sides of the keyboard. The same principle might be operating on the middle of your name.
A related thing I've wondered about for years: in the far future, when knowledge of QWERTY has been lost, will textual critics be able to reconstruct its layout from surving typos?
Philip Taylor said,
April 5, 2025 @ 7:43 am
Chris — "I would say because Vicotr is obstruent-sonorant-obstruent-sonorant-obstruent-sonorant". You may well be right, but why might that fact (or those facts) affect one’s typing, where the onstruence/sonorance would seem to be completely irrelevant ?
David Marjanović said,
April 5, 2025 @ 7:43 am
Yes: C on the left, T on the left, O on the right.
This is the most common kind of typo in my experience.
Absolutely.
David Marjanović said,
April 5, 2025 @ 7:44 am
Heh, I almost overlooked that one. That's a completely different kind, haplology (or indeed haplogy), that also happens in handwriting…
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 5, 2025 @ 7:48 am
This might be a handedness issue, rather than a linguistic one. Would be interesting to follow up on this.
cliff arroyo said,
April 5, 2025 @ 8:18 am
A very common typo for me is langauge… I'm fairly sure its related to distance the fingers have to move (if you were trained in the 'home row' method. My brain sends the u finger first but the a has less distance to travel and so makes it to the key first…
stephen said,
April 5, 2025 @ 9:10 am
Cairn is a word, that could be a factor.
I wonder how much AI is involved at names.org.
A Star Trek producer, DC Fontana, suggested that Mr. Spock’s family name is Xtmprszntwfld. So I typed that into names.org and it asked me if it is offensive or gibberish. I told it no, then it gave me another set of random letters with the same inquiry.
I typed in Xylophone and Xylophogrng and it didn’t have the same problem with those.
Seonachan said,
April 5, 2025 @ 9:22 am
I think cliff is on to it. The left index finger typing the "t" goes down to the bottom row for the "V", and stays down-ish while the adjacent finger types the "c". Meanwhile the right middle finger goes up to the top row for the "i", and at least for me, the ring finger moves up with it, so it's already hovering over the "o" when the left index starts moving up. If the name was Vietor, I bet it would be mistyped as Vieotr much less frequently.
Robert Coren said,
April 5, 2025 @ 9:44 am
I mistype "Robert" on a regular basis. I also have particular trouble with "particular", which my hands really want to type as "particualr". (Unsurprisingly, auto-correct did not want it typed that way.)
David Marjanović said,
April 5, 2025 @ 9:56 am
Very good point. And yes, I've seen lots of langauge and probably committed a few myself.
Laura Morland said,
April 5, 2025 @ 10:47 am
Expert touch-typist here, voting for Carin's alternate hands explanation. (More relevant than "distance from home keys," IMHO.)
Coby said,
April 5, 2025 @ 11:22 am
Qwerty may be fine for finger typing, but what mystifies me is why certain TV channels use it for their search function, where the "typing" is done by using the remote control to move the cursor around the keyboard shown on the screen.
Rodger C said,
April 5, 2025 @ 11:36 am
I have to ask how many people who type "Vicotr" are touch-typing versus using two fingers. Different types of error are fostered.
Victor Mair said,
April 5, 2025 @ 11:37 am
All right, we've gotten lots of good suggestions. I'm in the midst of a conference, so can't tell you my theory right now, but will do so later this afternoon.
David Z. said,
April 5, 2025 @ 12:04 pm
I work for a superior court, and notice that the name Garcia is often mistyped Garica, and I've done this myself. I believe it is an error from ten-finger touch typing (such as that taught by Miss Anne Nicholson and Corona del Mar High School in the 1960s). It may be because it takes longer for the left-hand middle finger to reach down to the C, than for the right-hand middle finger to reach slightly upward to the I, even if the C signal from the brain preceded the I signal. So I endorse the "home row" thesis stated abovel.
Philip Taylor said,
April 5, 2025 @ 1:51 pm
Coby — "what mystifies me is why certain TV channels use [the QWERTY layout] for their search function". What mystifies me is why some don’t — I know where each key is on a QWERTY layout, whereas when they are presented in alphabetical order I have to search for them. Confession — I was taught to touch-type as a part of my (telecommunications technician) apprenticeship at the age of 16 — now some 62 years ago …
Victor Mair said,
April 5, 2025 @ 2:30 pm
After analyzing the movements of my fingers when typing my name, I'm 99.9% certain that here's how the mistyping of "Victor" as "Vicotr" happens for me.
V index finger left hand, no problem
i middle finger right hand, no problem
c middle finger left hand, no problem
t index finger left hand, big problems; it is actually very awkward, almost requiring some sort of contortion, for my left index finger to reach upward and slightly to the right for the "t" while my middle left finger is still finishing off the "c"; the left index finger seems actually to resent what it is being asked to do — push down on the "t" key
o while the left index finger stalls before striking the "t" key, my ring finger on the right hand is suspended in mid-air and already starting its downward plunge, which often produces the "o" before the left index finger decides to produce the "t", so out comes "ot" before the intended "to"
r left index finger, no sweat
I'm a very fast typist, so it takes considerable effort to make the left index finger go ahead, speed up, and hit the "t" key, while the right ring finger is already dangling / hovering just a millimeter or two above the surface of the "o" key and has to be restrained from falling down on the "o" key while the left index finger is trying to make up its mind and reach upward and then downward to hit the "t" key.
J.M.G.N. said,
April 5, 2025 @ 3:27 pm
"I and the people who…"
Don't we put ourselves last in coordinations anymore?
Victor Mair said,
April 5, 2025 @ 5:36 pm
I wanted to avoid "to me and I".
Deborah Pickett said,
April 5, 2025 @ 5:41 pm
I'll be That One Dvorak Layout Person you get in every thread.
On a QWERTY layout, the finger travel from C to T is a fair way. On a Dvorak layout, they're right next to each other. (If you're following along on a QWERTY keyboard, the keypresses for "V-I-C-T-O-R" correspond to ".-C-I-K-S-O".)
Dvorak layout is designed so that the left hand is responsible for all vowels, and the right hand is responsible for the 15 or so most common consonants, including V, C, T, R. Clusters of consonants are supposed to be easy to type with a roll of the right hand; C-T is of middling difficulty, two successive uses of the same finger on adjacent rows.
Yet I, too, type "Vicotr" if I'm not careful.
Perhaps this lends credence to the alternating-hands conjecture over the finger-travel conjecture.
It'd be interesting to get input from other users of layouts that are not (descended from) QWERTY.