When it comes to proofreading, whether it’s intended to be published online or in print, there is no room for error. As soon as that copy is in the public domain, it stands as a representation of whoever wrote it.

A proofreader’s job is to act as a safety net for these bugs, catching and fixing bugs before they can go undetected, but sometimes, bugs go undetected nonetheless. Even the smallest of proofreading errors can have huge repercussions, at the very least making the author look careless and uninformed, and at worst completely changing the meaning of what is being said.

While this can be fun in some circumstances, it ultimately shines a bright light on why proofreading is so important to your business.

Read on for ten of my favorite famous proofreading mistakes, where small instances of poor proofreading have caused red-faced authors widespread pain.

1. Correctors wanted

When posting an ad looking for proofreaders, you’d expect the job description to be grammatically flawless. However, a recently posted job advertisement seeking a ‘Style Editor for Women’s Magazine Site’ contained no fewer than 3 misspellings: it twice asked for ‘editing’ experience, then misquoted the magazine name as ‘World of women’. of ‘World of Women’.

2. Continuity error

Of course, the proofreader shouldn’t just catch misspellings: maintaining continuity is just as important. An early edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein contains the phrase “the last days of December”. However, an attentive proofreader would have changed this to ‘September’, which was the month referred to in the rest of the passage. Later editions of the novel bore the correct date.

3. Grauniada or Guardian?

The Guardian newspaper has earned an impressive reputation for its frequent typos, so much so that it has earned the nickname ‘The Grauniad’ (first used in Private Eye magazine). The first issue of The Guardian, which contained the misspelling ‘atction’ for ‘auction’, is often cited.

4. Wrong

In 1988, the University of Wisconsin awarded thousands of diplomas with the glaring error ‘Wisconson’ written on each one. Six months passed before anyone noticed this mistake. An official at the time defended this by saying that the certificates had been corrected, but only to verify their names and grade subjects, not the ‘standard information’.

5. When corrections become mistakes

A poem by WB Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, contained a reference to ‘soldier Aristotle’. An overzealous printer assumed the poet had made a misspelling and corrected it to ‘soldier Aristotle’, a correction that remained in print for years and gave the sentence an entirely different meaning.

6. Adulterated text

In the 1632 edition of the King James Bible, the omission of the word ‘not’ gave a whole new meaning to the seventh commandment, which appears as ‘You shall commit adultery’. The printer for this error was found £300 for the error of it.

7. Web ciphers gone wrong

Several products in Comet’s online store were advertised at bargain prices in 2002, when some obviously incorrect figures went unnoticed and were posted on the site. This resulted in some lucky buyers being able to buy, say, an Aiwa hi-fi set worth £89 for £8.43.

8. The expensive comma

The one-comma case cost a Canadian cable television provider more than $1 million in 2006, when it lost a court case in a contract dispute with a telephone company. This was due to the inclusion of the second comma in the contract line which stated that the agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is concluded, and thereafter for successive periods of five years, less and until terminated with one year’s written notice from either party.”

Although the cable television company believed that the first five years of the deal were locked in, the inclusion of the second comma changed the meaning of the award, allowing the telephone company to terminate the contract at any time with a year’s notice.

9. Fault Check

GCSE students across England were left in the lurch in 2008, when their exams contained a significant disparity between question and answer booklets. The examination board responsible for the examinations did not realize this and allowed some one hundred thousand examination booklets to be printed before school supervisors noticed the error.

10. Not consulting a dictionary

A newspaper headline touting the benefits of reading Webster’s Dictionary in 2000 could hardly have done much for the credibility of the Jackson Citizen Patriot. The published story about an avid reader of the famous dictionary was accompanied by the headline: ‘Want to spell like a champion? Read Wenster’s dictionary.