"Horicontal" etymology—mistaken foreign spelling of horizontal?

Question

I came across the word "horicontal" in a technical paper. The context made it clear that its meaning was effectively identical to "horizontal". I looked into it, suspecting a misspelling. I found enough instances of the word in published works that I now think it is more than a mere typo.

It seems to me that I saw "horicontal" used with disproportionately high frequency in technical publications, and in publications with at least one (usually more) German authors.

I'd like to know the etymology of "horicontal"—how did this spelling originate? Does it appear as a translation in foreign dictionaries? I could not find any examples of such.

Here are some examples of "horicontal" in published work:

• https://books.google.com/books?id=sj_Ry-MgBQQC&pg=PA1468&dq=horicontal
• https://books.google.com/books?id=ZuvrCAAAQBAJ&pg=PA169&dq=horicontal

And a slide originally from the 1918 "Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body", whose Wikipedia Commons file description by two Germans uses the word "horicontal" while the file name uses "horiconatal" which is almost certainly a typo (natal or conatal make no sense in context):

• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Telencephalon-Horiconatal.jpg

Answer 1

From the basic Ngram of horicontal vs. horizontal, the former has a 2008 prevalence of .0000000086% and the latter of .0019994350%; in other words, horizontal is 232,492 times more common.

Horizontol comes in at .0000000270%, more than three times as common. But Google Books is chock full of OCR errors, and we could write that off to the similarity of o and a glyphs in some typefaces, especially when ink may be faded or worn. That doesn't explain horixontal, however, with a prevalence of .0000000418%.

What does explain it is that on an English QWERTY keyboard, Z, X, and C are all situated at the far left of the bottom row, and while the first two are relatively rare (and difficult to reach), C is fairly common, and a typist's muscle memory may punch the wrong key out of habit.

I don't see real evidence that the typos are more common among German authors. On German QWERTZU keyboards, the positions of Y and Z are switched compared to the QWERTY, so perhaps someone accustomed to a QWERTY keyboard typing on a QWERTZU keyboard would hit C or X instead of Z more often— but then we'd expect at least a few appearances of horiyontal, of which Google Books has none.

Answer 2

My Google-fu is not great, but the only place I've found it on the internet in a non-scanned format is this very question. It occasionally comes up from 1807 on, but half of the time, when I click on the site, the word in the book is actually hori-zontal.

Other paces, the z is smudged or incomplete:

I can't say I know enough about scanning mistakes, but I can see why it might be read as a "c".