From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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."
In the
1930s,
Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition
accidentally documented, for four years, a supposed word "dord",
whose only basis was a clerical error by
the publisher.
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." The entrywhich is clearly an error for thinkseems
to have been based on faulty data in the
corpus on which the dictionary was based, but it is not
clear how the human editors went ahead and prepared an entry and
definition based on that data. The word was removed from later
editions.
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.
Although dictionaries are often assumed to be flawless, most
lexicographers and people who frequently use dictionaries
are keenly aware that all dictionaries contain errors. The
preparation of dictionaries requires immense time, expertise,
and concentration, and there are never sufficient human and
financial resources available to ensure complete accuracy. As
Dr. Johnson himself said, "Dictionaries are like watches,
the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected
to go quite true."
