1043-3155 Pediatr Neurol Briefs pedneurbriefs Pediatr Neurol Briefs Pediatric Neurology Briefs Pediatr Neurol Briefs 1043-3155 2166-6482 1043-3155 Pediatric Neurology Briefs Publishers Chicago, IL, USA PNB-2015-29-8-7 10.15844/pedneurbriefs-29-8-7 Editorial Neurology Pediatrics Nervous System Diseases Child Development Brain Diseases Neurosurgery Child Infant Hypsarhythmia or Hypsarrhythmia? http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0798-0131 Millichap John J. MD 1 2 * http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0173-7931 Millichap J. Gordon MD 1 2 Division of Neurology, Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago, Chicago, IL Departments of Pediatrics and Neurology, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL Correspondence: Dr John J. Millichap, E-mail: j-millichap@northwestern.edu 08 2015 07 09 2015 29 8 64 64 25 08 2015 28 08 2015 Copyright: © 2015 The Author(s) 2015 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Hypsarhythmia was originally spelled with one ‘r’ by Drs Frederick and Erna Gibbs when they coined the term in 1952.

 EEG Epilepsy Infantile Spasms

Hypsarhythmia was originally spelled with one ‘r’ by Drs Frederick and Erna Gibbs when they coined the term in 1952 [1]. They wished to emphasize that “the term applied to a specific type of electroencephalographic abnormality”, and preferred the specific one ‘r’ spelling to avoid confusion with a literal translation of the two ‘r’ Greek root, “mountainous arrhythmia” [2, 3]. The one ‘r’ spelling was the rule in the 1950s-60s [4]. The two ‘r’ spelling eventually became convention in the literature by the mid-1970s (Figure 1).

Google Ngram Viewer: Book text search for case-insensitive ‘Hypsarrhythmia’ (blue line) and ‘Hypsarhythmia’ (red line) from 1950-2008 in English. [Cited August 31 2015.] Available from: https://goo.gl/sJI1uG

Although the Editor of Pediatric Neurology Briefs prefers the single ‘r’ spelling in deference to Dr Gibbs, the intended meaning is accepted for both spellings today.

Disclosures

The author(s) have declared that no competing interests exist.

 Gibbs FA Gibbs EL Atlas of Electroencephalography 1952 Reading (MA) Addison-Wesley http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/768435492 Gibbs FA Infantile Spasms and Hypsarrhythmia or Hypsarhythmia Dev Med Child Neurol 1965 Jun 7 3 329 10.1111/j.1469-8749.1965.tb10947.x 14343238 MacKeith R Infantile Spasms and Hypsarrhythmia or Hypsarhythmia Dev Med Child Neurol 1965 Apr 7 2 204 10.1111/j.1469-8749.1965.tb10916.x 14317541 Millichap JG Bickford RG Infantile Spasms, Hypsarhythmia, and Mental Retardation JAMA 1962 182 5 523 527 10.1001/jama.1962.03050440015004