Lexicographic error
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A lexicographic error is an inaccurate entry in a dictionary. Such problems, because they undercut the intention of providing authoritative guidance to readers and writers, attract special attention.
An early English-language example was the definition of pastern as "the knee of a horse" in Dr. Johnson's famed 18th-century Dictionary of the English Language. That would suit the word fetlock, but the pastern is in fact a long portion of the leg immediately below the fetlock. When a woman asked him why he had made the error, Johnson, according to Boswell, replied, "Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance."[1]
In the 1930s,
The first edition (1987) of the Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary contained an entry for a verb hink, which it said was conjugated hinks, hinking, hinked and which it defined as follows: "If you hink, you think hopefully and unrealistically about something."[3] The entry is a ghost word—included by the editors to trap plagiarists. The wording is the result of an in-house joke. However, some reviewers took it seriously, speculating for example that it is "clearly an error for 'think'." The word was removed from later editions.[citation needed]
In the early 21st century, the online and CD-ROM editions of the Macmillan English Dictionary gave two different spoken readings of the headword for the entry "George, St. – the PATRON SAINT of England": the American reading was the correct "Saint George," but the British reading was "George Street." Presumably the British narrator had been given a list of words to read and the comma after "George" was either missing or overlooked.[citation needed]
Although dictionaries are often expected to be flawless, most
References
- ^ Boswell, James (1917). Osgood, Charles Grosvenor (ed.). Boswell's Life of Johnson. Retrieved 30 January 2015.
- JSTOR 453337.
- ISBN 0003700232.)
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