A mondegreen is a misheard phrase that creates a new meaning, common in song lyrics children learn by ear.

The longer version

Speech arrives as a continuous stream, and the listener cuts it into words using expectations rather than acoustics, so an unfamiliar phrase gets rebuilt out of familiar pieces. A line in an old ballad about laying a body on the green was heard as a name for a lady, and that mishearing gave the phenomenon its label.

Same-language listeners make these errors most often with songs, prayers and anthems, because the words are heard many times before they are seen. Children learning lyrics by ear produce them constantly. A related change happens when a heard phrase is rewritten into a more sensible one, as when an odd idiom is replaced by a similar-sounding literal phrase.

Where this entry sits

This category gathers small surprises about the English language, from odd spelling rules to words that quietly hide their own history. Expect palindromes, punctuation oddities, borrowed terms, and the strange ways writing systems record spoken speech. The full list sits on the Words and Language page, where every entry is listed in order.