Increasing incidence within PubMed of the use of the misspelling “pruritis” (sic) instead of “pruritus” for itch

Abstract

Writers generally benefit from word processing technology, and the use of other forms of formal writing such as typewriters is archaic. The first stand-alone spell checker programs originated in the early 1980s, and by 1995 they were embedded within word processing programs such as Word 95 (1). With the ubiquity of such software, spelling errors in the medical literature should be extinct. Yet, as a reader of the medical literature with an interest in itch, this author is impressed with the numbers of misspellings of the word «pruritus.» The word pruritus is derived from the Latin pruritus, past participle of prurire “to itch” (2) To assess the frequency and characteristics of the misspellings of this word, a PubMed search was undertaken.