![]() By his account, the princess was named Innogen, not Imogen. ![]() In 1611, an astrologer named Simon Forman saw the earliest-known performance of Cymbeline and wrote about it in his diary. Pretty compelling evidence so far-and the plot thickens. In Cymbeline, Imogen marries a character named Posthumus Leonatus. Cymbeline wouldn’t even have been the first time the Bard used the name: In a 1600 quarto of Much Ado About Nothing, Innogen is mentioned as Leonato’s wife. But the name Imogen was uncommon (potentially even bordering on nonexistent) at the time and while it’s believable that the master wordsmith might have made it up, some scholars think he originally wrote Innogen.įor one, the name Innogen was mentioned in another part of Holinshed’s Chronicles, and we know Shakespeare was well-acquainted with the text. One of them is Cymbeline, about an ancient British king and his daughter, Imogen. Holinshed’s Chronicles were well-known during the Renaissance era-Shakespeare used them as a source for some of his plays. “The sense which the dictionaries give to abacot … is as ludicrously wide of the mark as the form itself,” Murray said. The real term, bycoket, describes something less grandiose-it’s the type of hat Robin Hood is often portrayed as wearing. It was also laughable that centuries’ worth of scholars thought it was specifically used to describe dual-crowned headgear fit only for kings. To Murray, the absurdity of the situation wasn’t just about abacot being a fake word. Holinshed dropped the t, and Fleming added his own inexplicable flair. From there, it became bycocket, then bococket, and then someone accidentally printed a bococket as one word: abococket. Oxford English Dictionary editor James Murray traced abacot back through a comedy of misspellings that started with bycoket, an actual word for a peaked cap. It wasn’t until the 1880s that the erroneous origins of abacot were finally exposed. For the next 200 years, dictionaries listed abacot as a double-crowned cap of state worn by English kings, just like Holinshed had described it. At one point, Holinshed mentions King Henry’s “highe cappe of estate, called Abococke, garnished with two riche crownes.” For some reason, Fleming changed abococke to abacot in his 1587 version of Holinshed’s Chronicles, and the ghost word landed in Henry Spelman’s Glossarium in 1664. It all started in the late 16th century when Abraham Fleming was editing Raphael Holinshed’s chronicles of British history. Zoonar/J.Wachala // iStock via Getty Images Plusĭord’s 13 years in print is nothing compared to the three centuries that abacot spent haunting reference materials. From Bycoket to AbacotĪ Robin Hood statue in Nottingham. When a different editor submitted yet another note card pointing out the error in 1947, dord was finally deleted. ![]() Somehow, it managed to stay in the dictionary for another eight years. In 1939, a Merriam-Webster editor spotted dord and scrawled “A ghost word!” in red on a note card asking for its removal. The next editor simply thought a space was missing between o and r, and the word dord ended up in the 1934 second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary. ![]() During the editorial process, all dictionary entries were supposed to have a space between each letter so any pronunciation marks could be added later. This particular flub occurred in the early 1930s, after an editor typed an entry that read " D or d," meaning that density can be abbreviated with an uppercase D or a lowercase d. In the case of dord, it stayed there for about 13 years. Dord is a ghost word-a non-existent word that slipped into the dictionary. Did you know that dord is a synonym for density? Probably not, because it isn’t. ![]()
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