"chocked full" (for the eggcorn files)

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Fri Feb 11 16:50:51 UTC 2005


In a letter of recommendation, a well-known linguist whose anonymity
will be shielded here writes that a certain student maintains a web
site "chocked full" of linguistic curiosities.  Checking on google, I
find 39,400 hits for "chocked full", but it seems clear from the
sources I checked (or chocked) that this can only be a reanalysis of
"chock-full", which has been around since the 18th and possibly even
the 15th c.  The OED reviews at its entry the long and inconclusive
debate about the origin of "chock-full" and its variant "choke-full",
and notes that

Prob. there is a recent association with CHOCK n. and v., in some of
their senses, but the latter are too late to be the origin; it is
more likely that these senses have been developed under the influence
of chock-full

Both the semantics of the adjective (cf. "crammed", "stuffed",
"packed") and the phonetic complexity of a putative -[kdf]- sequence
support the plausibility of a participial origin of "chock-full", but
given that no such origin exists, the  "chocked(-)full" spelling can
be seen as involving another hypercorrective "re"storation.

Larry



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