Words & WritingGreek → English
Cacography
/kæˈkɑɡrəfi/noun
Bad handwriting, or bad spelling.
The Greek roots
κακός
kakós
bad
γράφειν
gráphein
to write
Literally: “bad writing”
The story of the word
The word was built as the exact opposite of two others, calligraphy and orthography, and it covers both of their territories: script nobody can read and spelling nobody should copy. κακός is the workhorse Greek word for bad, and it hides inside cacophony and cachexia as well. Victorian schoolbooks printed cacography exercises, pages of deliberately mangled sentences for pupils to set right.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scholarly coinage → English
Same family
cacophonycachexiacacodemoncalligraphy
In a sentence
The prescription was a masterpiece of cacography and the pharmacist phoned to check.
He blamed his cacography on a fountain pen.