Another type of speech error is commonly described as a slip of the tongue. This produces expressions such as make a long shory stort (instead of “make a long story short”), use the door to open the key, and a fifty-pound dog of bag food. Slips of this type are sometimes called spoonerisms after William Spooner, an Anglican clergyman at Oxford University, who was renowned for his tongue-slips. Most of the slips attributed to him involve the interchange of two initial sounds, as when he addressed a rural group as noble tons of soil, or described God as a shoving leopard to his flock, or in this complaint to a student who had been absent from classes: You have hissed all my mystery lectures.

Most everyday slips of the tongue, however, are not as entertaining. They are often simply the result of a sound being carried over from one word to the next, as in black bloxes (for “black boxes”), or a sound used in one word in anticipation of its occurrence in the next word, as in noman numeral (for “roman numeral”), or a tup of tea (“cup”), or the most highly played player (“paid”). The last example is close to the reversal type of slip, illustrated by shu flots, which may not make you beel fetter if you’re suffering from a stick neff, and it’s always better to loop before you leak. The last two examples involve the interchange of word-final sounds and are much less common than word-initial slips.

It has been argued that slips of this type are never random, that they never produce a phonologically unacceptable sequence, and that they indicate the existence of different stages in the articulation of linguistic expressions. Although the slips are mostly treated as errors of articulation, it has been suggested that they may result from “slips of the brain” as it tries to organize linguistic messages.