Mondegreen

Mondegreen is a term for a misheard or misinterpreted phrase, especially in song lyrics, that yields an unintended meaning. The name was coined by American writer Sylvia Wright in 1954 in Harper's Magazine, in an essay later titled The Death of Lady Mondegreen. Wright described how, as a child, she misheard a line from the ballad The Bonny Earl o' Moray, creating the fictitious Lady Mondegreen and introducing the concept of this kind of misperception.

Mondegreens are common in music and poetry, where rapid diction, slurred consonants, or unfamiliar proper nouns can lead listeners to reinterpret lines. They can be humorous, revealing, or simply odd, and they often persist in popular culture through repetition and parody. Notable examples frequently cited include: “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” from Jimi Hendrix’s Purple Haze (mishearing of “kiss the sky”); “There’s a bathroom on the right” from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Bad Moon Rising (mishearing of “there’s a bad moon on the rise”); and “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” from the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (mishearing of “Lucy in the sky with diamonds”).

In linguistics and popular culture, mondegreens illustrate how listeners process phonetic input and rely on context to derive meaning. Dictionaries and linguistic references describe the phenomenon, and it has spawned numerous compilations, websites, and books collecting famous and obscure examples. While often benign, mondegreens highlight the gap between spoken language and perceived meaning in real time.