Dittography Explained

Dittography is the accidental, erroneous act of repeating a letter, word, phrase or combination of letters by a scribe or copyist.[1] The term is used in the field of textual criticism. The opposite phenomenon, in which a copyist omits text by skipping from a word or phrase to a similar word or phrase further on, is known as haplography.

Example

Papyrus 98 in Rev 1:13 has Greek, Modern (1453-);: περιεζωσμμενον instead of Greek, Modern (1453-);: περιεζωσμενον (doubled μ). The Codex Vaticanus repeats the word Greek, Modern (1453-);: διδασκαλος in John 13:14. the phrase "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians" appears twice in Acts 19:34 in the Codex Vaticanus, while it only appears once in other manuscripts.[2]

Notes and References

  1. Paul D. Wegner, A student's guide to textual criticism of the Bible: its history, methods, and results, InterVarsity Press, 2006, p. 48.
  2. Web site: Dittography . https://web.archive.org/web/20100612235833/https://earlham.edu/~seidti/iam/dittography.html . 12 June 2010 . earlham.edu.