cacography

Noun

cacography (countable and uncountable, plural cacographies)

1. Bad spelling or punctuation, especially unintuitive spellings considered as a feature of a whole language or dialect.
   • A phrase exhibits proofs of cacography, when the accents are misplaced, forgotten, or used erroneously.1846, Gabriel Surenne, A Practical Grammar of French Rhetoric, IV.4.1
   • In 1997, two American entrepreneurs, Robert Hoffer and Timothy Kay, formed a company called Typo.net to try to profit from Web surfers' cacography.1999 February 25, Jack Schofield, The Guardian

   Antonyms:

   orthography

2. Deliberate comic misspelling; malapropism.
   • The soul of dialect is cacography, the deliberate misspelling of words for comic effect, which is the written equivalent of the malapropism.2003, Onwuchekwa Jemie, editor, Yo' Mama!, page 10
3. Poor or illegible handwriting.
   • Many illegible letters is the sign of disorder, and the illegibility of Greeley's cacography has furnished numberless anecdotes.1904, John Rexford, What Handwriting Indicates, pages 90–91
   • 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.2002 June 29, Mil Millington, The Guardian

   Antonyms:

   calligraphy