This postSo, this guy named Ammon Shea just spent a year reading the whole Oxford English Dictionary. The whole thing. He’s writing a book about it, but he’s also posting to the Oxford University Press blog about it, and a couple days ago he posted Absurd Entries in the OED:
Absurd Entries is the name that I gave to a certain class of definition that I would come across every so often when reading the OED. They are rarer than the mistakes, and considerably more fun to read. These are the extremely rare moments when the OED does something that is so inexplicable that you have to close the book and check the cover to make sure that it is indeed the same book that you thought. I have decided, without giving too much thought to the matter, to divide them into two separate categories: “Blatant Disregard for the Reader’s Level of Education” and “What Were They Thinking?”
Some gems:
For instance, trondhjemite is defined as “Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase”. I have my doubts as to whether anyone has ever thought to themselves “I wonder what trondhjemite means?” But if someone did, and went to look it up in the OED, it seems unlikely that this definition would clear things up much.
In a rather unconventional bit of lexicography the word scindapse has no definition at all, but there is a nice little etymology which informs the reader that it comes from a Greek word which means “a ‘thingumbob’, a what-d’ye-call-it.”
For further reading on the OED, see K.M. Elisabeth Murray’s Caught in the Web of Words (a biography of James Murray, the editor of the OED) and Simon Winchester’s books The Professor and the Madman and The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.
