An error in writing or copying where a letter, syllable, or word is written only once when it should appear twice, like writing 'occasion' instead of 'occassion'.
From Greek haplos (single) + graphia (writing). Emerged in philology and manuscript studies in the 19th century to describe a specific class of copying errors.
Haplography is the opposite of dittography—where scribes repeat things—and understanding these errors revolutionized how scholars evaluate ancient manuscripts, revealing which copies came from which source!
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