eggcorn or simple misspelling?

[Laurence Horn]

I received a request from a senior scholar today who was

>  wondering if you would be interested in writing a forward for our
> new book

Since "forward" is a lot more common than "foreword", it's possible that the writer really thinks that a preface is designed to move the book forward, whence the reanalysis as a specialized nominal sense of the adjective/adverb (after all, that's what happened with the forward in basketball, hockey, or soccer, right?), or whether the writer simply thinks of them as two separate lexical items that just happen to be spelled the same, in which case it's not a eggcorn at all. Or whether it's a simple lapsus digiti.  Hard to know.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org