Miscopying

Miscopying is the act or result of copying something incorrectly, whether by transcription, reproduction, or digital duplication. It encompasses errors in copying text, data, or other content, and can occur at any stage from manual hand copying to automated processes. The term highlights the gap between the original and its copy, often with unintended changes in letters, numbers, or structure.

Historically, miscopying has been a concern in manuscript culture, where scribes copied texts by hand. Mistakes such as misspellings, transposed letters, omitted lines, or duplicated phrases could accumulate across copies, leading to textual variants and corrupt editions. In modern settings, similar problems arise with OCR scanning, data entry, or copy-paste operations, where recognition errors, typos, or misaligned fields produce faulty records.

Common types of miscopying include letter or digit substitutions, omissions, insertions, and transpositions; misalignment of data fields in tables; and partial or repeated phrases. Contributing factors include ambiguous handwriting, degraded source materials, insufficient proofreading, software limitations, and human fatigue during repetitive tasks. The consequences range from minor readability issues to significant data corruption, misinformation, or operational errors in databases and software.

Prevention focuses on verification and quality control, such as proofreading, double-entry checks, standardized templates, and automated validation. In digital workflows, version control, auditing, and error-detecting routines help identify and correct miscopies before they propagate. See also misquotation, transcription, copy editing, and data validation.