What is the word for dating documents by the mistakes in them?

single-word-requests

There are at least three terms that cover this:

  • Textual Criticism
  • Stemmatics
  • Cladistics

I don't think any of these terms are used specifically to mean 'dating documents by the mistakes [found] in them', but they are all related.


I don't know any specific academic term for this in relation to literary texts, but much the same process is used to analyse accumulated "random" errors in DNA replication to establish chronology and evolutionary paths. In that context it's called the molecular clock.

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