It has to be embarrassing to get a word wrong. When I define a word incorrectly, I always feel like the dumbest guy on the planet, even if it’s a difficult word. If I was the Oxford English Dictionary, and I had a word wrong, I’d probably be pretty irritated, too. No one is immune from the mistake bug, as the OED has had an incorrect definition of the word siphon for nearly 100 years, that’s gotta leave you with some egg on your face.
When Australian physicist Stephen Hughes looked up the word siphon in the OED in the process of preparing for a research paper, he found a mistake. The word siphon, meaning an object that moves fluid from a higher location to a lower location, was mentioned as using atmospheric pressure to work. As Prof. Hughes said in his letter to the OED, “It is gravity that moves the fluid in a siphon.”
Nearly every other dictionary sourced had the same mistake, Professor Hughes notes. The OED promises to correct the error, noting that the definition was written by “editors who were not scientists.”
Hey, we all make mistakes, even the people who are supposed to catch the mistakes!
Tags: dictionary fail, Oxford English Dictionary, OED, dictionary has wrong definition for 99 years, siphon, Stephen Hughes, incorrect definition, mistakes, physics