I saw this last week on an order form.
Problem:
This word is misspelled.
Explanation:
The order form had an area at the bottom where the customer was supposed to sign his or her name.
The order-form creator misspelled “Signatures” as “Signitures” — with an “i” in the middle — perhaps because of confusion from words such as “signify” — spelled S-I-G-N-I-F-Y — or perhaps because of mispronunciation of the letter “a” in the word “signatures”.
“Signify” dates back to the early 1200s and comes from the Latin word “significare”, which means to make a sign.
In contrast, “signature” dates back to around 1530 and comes from the Latin word “signare”, which means to mark.
For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:
- “signature” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 185,000,000 matches
- “signatures” — with the letter “a” in the middle — 34,700,000 matches
- “signiture” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 384,000 matches
- “signitures” — with the letter “i” in the middle — 57,700 matches
Combining the singular and plural results, this tells me that Web authors have used the correct letter “a” over the incorrect letter “i” by a ratio of 497-to-1, which is excellent. However, over 400 thousand misspellings is a bit troubling.
Solution:
“Signatures”