Medireview

Medireview was an erroneous correction of the word medieval in Yahoo! Mail in 2001.^[1][2][3]

In 2001, Yahoo! introduced an email filter which automatically replaced Javascript-related strings with alternate versions, to prevent the possibility of JavaScript viruses in HTML email. The filter would hyphenate the terms "Javascript", "Jscript", "Vbscript" and "Livescript", and replaced "eval", "mocha" and "expression" with the similar but not quite synonymous terms "review", "espresso" and "statement". Assumptions were involved in the writing of the filters: no attempts were made to limit these string replacements to script sections and attributes, or to respect word boundaries, in case this would leave some loophole open.

One unintended effect of this was that the word medieval became medireview, in the body of Yahoo! email messages. Not all email recipients recognised this as an error or may have even thought it was intentional. As of 2009^[update] there are still web pages seen which use medireview instead of medieval.^[4][5][6] Among other effects were the replacement of evaluation with reviewuation, expressionist with statementist, prevalent with prreviewent and the replacement of the French word cheval (horse) with chreview, rendering them into near-gibberish.

See also

• Scunthorpe problem, a similar problem in automated filters designed to block obscenity
• Yamanner

References

1. ^ BBC story
2. ^ Need To Know story
3. ^ New Scientist story
4. ^ Example 1
5. ^ Example 2
6. ^ Example 3