different between scrawled vs cacography

English

Adjective

scrawled (not comparable)

1. Having been written in a rapid and sloppy manner.

   The doctor's scrawled signature was almost unreadable.

Verb

scrawled

1. simple past tense and past participle of scrawl

   He scrawled his signature on the receipt with quick disregard for legibility.

Anagrams

• arcwelds

English

Alternative forms

• kakography

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /ka?k????fi/
• Rhymes: -????fi

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. [from 16th c.]
   • 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, Jack Schofield, The Guardian, 25 Feb 1999:

     In 1997, two American entrepreneurs, Robert Hoffer and Timothy Kay, formed a company called Typo.net to try to profit from Web surfers' cacography.
2. Poor or illegible handwriting. [from 17th c.]
   • 1904, John Rexford, What Handwriting Indicates, pp. 90-91:

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

   • 2002, Mil Millington, The Guardian, 29 Jun 2002:

     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.

Antonyms

• (poor spelling system): orthography
• (poor handwriting): calligraphy

Derived terms

• cacographer
• cacographic
• cacographical

Translations

See also

• illegible
• indecipherable
• indistinct
• obscure
• scrawled
• unclear
• undecipherable
• unreadable