And the word of the day is: Homoioteleuton (ho-mee-oh-te-loot’-on)
Roughly, “same ending”. A homoioteleuton is two lines of text in which the ending is the same. For example:
1 The very tall man was walking
2 down the well-lit city street
3 where the woman was talking
4 to a little girl.
During the copying of manuscripts, this can result in recognizable kind of copying error: Skipping a section of the text.
In this example, if you’re copying the text, it would be easy to skip lines 2 & 3. You copy line 1, and when your eyes go back to the page, you accidentally go back to the end of line 3 instead of the end of line 1. You end up with “The very tall man was walking to a little girl.”
This can be very useful to textual critics, trying to figure out which manuscript has the original reading. If you have two manuscripts (A and B), and A reads 1,4 while B reads 1,2,3,4, you can be pretty sure what happened. “Oh,” you say, “the scribe skipped those lines because of the similar ending homoioteleuton.”