Another common form of folk etymology happens when people alter the spelling of strange or unfamiliar words so that they appear to make more sense. For example, there’s a drowsy little rodent that the French therefore used to call a dormeuse, which meant she who sleeps. In English we call the same creature a dormouse. That’s despite the fact that it isn’t a mouse and has no particular affinity for doors. The reason is that the English had field mice and town mice and so they were, of course, going to look at the word dormeuse and conclude that someone just didn’t know how to spell.
