The dictionary definition of the word “siphon” has been wrong for nearly a century — even in the ever-authoritative Oxford English Dictionary.
Physicist Stephen Hughes of the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, spotted the mistake while writing an article on the physics of siphoning, reports the Science Blog of British newspaper The Guardian.
Australian website news.com.au quotes Hughes:
“My initial reaction was shock. I just stood there like a stunned mullet thinking how can this be?”
Concussed fish notwithstanding, it’s certainly a little embarrassing — although having said that, any piece of work that contains over 290,000 entries is inevitably going to have the odd snafu.
An OED spokesman said the offending entry was written in 1911, by “editors who were not scientists”.
What did they actually get wrong? The OED claimed that siphons move liquids from one container to another using “the force of atmospheric pressure”. Actually it is the force of gravity that moves the liquid, as Physorg explains with the help of a video.
Sadly the OED wasn’t able to fall back on the standard excuse given by reference works when mistakes are found: that they put them in deliberately to catch out plagiarists, who will look like idiots if they unwittingly copy them into their own books without checking if they’re correct.
SOURCE: New Scientist
WWW Editor’s note: Dictionary.com shows the definition as:
si·phon [sahy-fuh
n]
noun
1. a tube or conduit bent into legs of unequal length, for use in drawing a liquid from one container into another on a lower level by placing the shorter leg into the container above and the longer leg into the one below, the liquid being forced up the shorter leg and into the longer one by the pressure of the atmosphere.
As does dictionary.net.
As does Websters.
Seems they’ve all been siphoning off each other?
Posted on May 12th, 2010 at 8:04 pm by Lin McNulty
0