cacography

• kakography

From caco- +‎ -graphy, perhaps after Middle French cacographie.

• (UK) IPA^(key): /kaˈkɒɡɹəfi/
• Rhymes: -ɒɡɹəfi

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.]

   Antonym: orthography

   • 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 February 25, Jack Schofield, The Guardian:

     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, editor, Yo' Mama!, page 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.]

   Antonym: calligraphy

   • 1904, John Rexford, What Handwriting Indicates, pages 90–91:

     Many illegible letters is the sign of disorder, and the illegibility of Greeley's cacography has furnished numberless anecdotes.

   • 2002 June 29, Mil Millington, The Guardian:

     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, page 63:

     I don't even recognize the handwriting – kind of a scrawled, almost illegible cacography with the letters slanting haphazardly in all directions.