The previous three forms of scribal errors – homeoteleuton, homeoarchy, and haplography – involve omissions to the text during copying. We now move to the family of errors that involve additions to the text. First up, dittography. Whereas haplography included the omission of text between similar phrase, dittography involves the repetition of a phrase.

A prime example of dittography is in Acts 19.34. The ESV reads:

“But when they recognized that he was a Jew, for about two hours they all cried out with one voice, ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!’”

One of the most reliable manuscripts has the last phrase repeated. So it would read:

“But when they recognized that he was a Jew, for about two hours they all cried out with one voice, ‘Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!’”

Since this makes absolutely no difference to the meaning of the text and since only one manuscript has the duplication, this variant is not critical. In fact, it can be seen that such duplication can cause a change of meaning in almost no cases. Hence, dittography does not cause any significant alterations of meaning to the biblical text.