People who compile reference books like dictionaries have to be on the lookout, not just for mountweazels inserted into other references as copyright bait, but also for simple mistakes. After all, if you’re going to write your own dictionary, some of the best places to start are other dictionaries. But what if one of them made an error — and another one innocently repeated it — and then the next — and so on? We have a pretty good idea what would would happen, because it already has.
The first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in 1771, included an entry for a thing called an abacot. It was, explained the tome, “the name of an ancient cap of state worn by the kings of England, the upper part whereof was in the form of a double crown.” The Encyclopedia probably found “abacot” in Holinshed’s Chronicles from 1587. That seems to be where Nathan Bailey found it when he included the word in his 1721 dictionary. Noah Webster probably found it in Bailey’s dictionary, and included it in his own in 1828.
But later in the 1800s James Murray (the professor from the film The Professor and the Madman) was working on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. He found “abacot” mentioned in those references, but when he dug deeper he discovered that really the word was “bycoket” — an ornamental cap with peaks in the front and back. It comes from the Old French word “bicoquet”, and evidently that sort of headgear came from France too.
But then Murray had to decide what to do with abacot. He’d discovered that the original entries had been based on a mistake, and in a sense there was no such word. On the other hand, by being included in dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word “abacot” had certainly been used, so there WAS such a word. What do to, what to do.
What Murray decided to do was to write one of the oddest entries in the original OED. In the definition for “bycoket” he wrote this:
“Through a remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error, this word appears in modern dictionaries as abacot. In Hall’s Chronicles a bicocket appears to have been misprinted abococket, which was copied by Grafton, altered by Holinshed to abococke, and finally “improved” by Abraham Fleming to abacot (perhaps through an intermediate abacoc); hence it was again copied by Baker, inserted in his Glossarium by Spelman, and thence copied by Phillips, and so handed down through Bailey, Ash, Todd, etc., to 19th century dictionaries (some of which provide a picture of the “abacot”), and even inserted in dictionaries of English and foreign languages.”
It was probably too late, though. “Abacot” was and is exceedingly obscure, but it has been used occasionally outside of reference books. So the 2011 edition of the OED just defines “abacot” and cites some places where it’s been used, and doesn’t say anything about Murray’s entry. It’s not even one of the citations.
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