Century-Old Dictionary Error Shows That 'Professionally' Edited Reference Books Make Errors Too
from the don't-freak-out dept
A couple months ago I finally got around to reading The Professor and the Madman, a book I'd actually picked up a couple years ago just because it looked interesting. It's about the creation of the very first Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and some of the characters (and I do mean characters) involved. Frankly, while the story is interesting, the book feels very padded. It's the sort of story that would have been much better as a long magazine feature rather than an entire book.However, one thing that struck me was how the OED was basically its own version of Wikipedia at the time. After all, how do you go about cataloging every single English word ever used? Especially when there are really no other English dictionaries to speak of (at least not any that aim to be complete)? Well, you build up a massive roster of volunteers to do all the work for you. That's exactly what OED apparently did. They put out ads and flyers and built up a huge volunteer army to scour books, write down words, and highlight the definition and first usage of those words, which the OED team then assembled. The process took decades, but would have taken longer (if it would have been done at all) had it not been for the army of volunteers participating. Reading the chapters of the book about this part of the process made it sound very, very similar to Wikipedia in many ways. Of course, there was one major difference: at the end of the day, you still supposedly had the "professional" editors deciding what finally went into the book.
I'd been considering writing up a post about that similarities, but wasn't quite sure about how to fit it in, when johnjac alerted us to the story about how a physicist just discovered a 99-year old error in the OED, on the definition of the word "siphon." Apparently, the definition states that it's atmospheric pressure, rather than gravity that makes the siphon work, which is incorrect. Yet, because the OED is considered such an authority, many of the top dictionaries all make the same claim -- and some "professional" encyclopedias do as well (though, not Britannica, if you were wondering). The OED promises to correct the error, though, of course, that won't be until the next edition.
To some extent, this highlights the same point many people have made about Wikipedia for ages: both the "professionally edited" reference books and the open edited reference sources have errors. But how quickly can they be corrected? If Wikipedia had the same error, it could be corrected immediately. With OED, it appears that people needed to wait a while.
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Filed Under: dictionary, editing, oxford english dictionary, professionals, siphon
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Wait....
Yeah, but can Wikipedia keep the wind from shutting my bedroom door? Can it act as a booster seat for a child? Is it heavy enough to kill an attacking puma if thrown?
In all these ways, the Oxford Dictionary is superior to Wikipedia. If you're actually using the Oxford Dictionary to look up words, you're doing it wrong....
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Re: Wait....
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Re: Wait....
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Longevity
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Re: Longevity
Interesting statement. Since WikiP is constantly being edited, it can be seen as *always* being outdated.
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Re: Re: Longevity
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pressure AND gravity are required.
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mercury in a vacume does not evaporate.
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Re: Siphon Won’t Work In A Vacuum
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Mercury has an abnormally low triple point pressure - less than one millionth that of water (1.65 × 10−7 kPa) but it is not zero - and so even mercury WILL evaporate in a true vacuum.
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Re: Vacuum
There has to be a connection with atmospheric pressure, the professor is not completely right. A siphon cannot work if the hump is significantly larger than the equivalent height of the atmospheric pressure for the liquid, i.e. about 34 feet for water at 1 atm, 30 inches for mercury. It is the pressure of the atmosphere that is pushing the water up the pipe, although gravity does pull it down the lower side causing the liquid to flow. If you try to make the hump any bigger than that height, you'll get a void (vacuum) forming at the top of the hump and the flow will stop.
The Wikipedia entry for Atmospheric Pressure says "This is also the maximum height to which a column of water can be drawn up by suction" which is exactly what a siphon does, it uses gravity to generate suction that pulls the liquid over the hump. Surface tension might have some effect on the maximum height of the hump, but it couldn't be very big and would depend on the diameter of the pipe.
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Agreed. We should also ignore everything written for the last 99 years, since clearly writers composing in English were working with a faulty dictionary....
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Oh, wait.
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This is silly.
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Let me know when Wikipedia even approaches that level of accuracy
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Looks pretty accurate to me.
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If wikipedia fails, it is, in part, *our* fault for failing at keeping it accurate and updated.
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"However, one thing that struck me was how the OED was basically its own version of Wikipedia at the time...Reading the chapters of the book about this part of the process made it sound very, very similar to Wikipedia in many ways."
This is like a young girl claiming her grandmother resembles her, when in fact its the other way around.
Nothing about the OED process mimics or highlights anything that Wikipedia has done. It's completely the other way around. These new-world, tech-savvy buzzwords like crowd-sourcing and mass collaboration have existed for centuries - nothing has changed but the medium.
Let's all take a step down from the high horse and remember people a lot smarter than us a long time ago created these processes which we all seemed to have rediscovered through technology.
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True in a way BUT there is a big difference. The technology seems to enable the enterprise to become much bigger without changing its nature.
Compare the peer to peer lending site ZOPA with the friendly societies and mutual savings and loans societies that started in the 19th century.
They are both basically the same idea but ZOPA has been able to become much larger whilst remaining true to its original mission whereas the mutual societies ended up looking much too much like the banks that they originally intended to replace.
Similarly the OED may have started as a crowdsourced project but it quickly turned into a commercial enterprise like any other.
Wikipedia on the other hand remains mutual.
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Re:
I read this book a few months ago as well and one of the things the authors highlights is how people would send in words on cards along with references to books and the way the word was used. This would be "pigeonholed" in a large warehouse then editors would review each card for inclusion in the dictionary volumes. This is similar to what Wikipedia is doing now. Post something and put a reference. If there is no reference or citation, it is usually pulled off the article.
I do acknowledge that there are factual errors on Wikipedia as well as outright falsehoods. Guess what, there are in books too. (hence the saying: "History is written by the victors." Winston Churchill.) Google for articles talking about how history books have changed over the years. How things like the Holocaust and the slaughter of Indians is being re-written or even dropped entirely. Whose to say that some editor didn't like the way a word was used cause that isn't the way he used it so he changed it from the card?
ps: Mike: I agree with you on the book itself. It was really kind of annoying when I read thru the one chapter that explained the meeting and stuff to only have the author say that was what everyone thinks happened BUT this is now what really happened.
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Yeah, that was incredibly annoying. It was as if the author set up the whole book to get you to believe that particular story, and then pulls the rug out from under you at the end like some big reveal. Except all it did was make me wonder why it needed 200 pages of setup.
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Below the triple point pressure substances will transition directly from solid to vapour and back without entering the liquid phase.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_point_(thermodynamics)
This mostly talks about the boundries between liquid and vapor. Do you have a reference for solid liquid boundries?
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Google...
Was intended to reference Density - "D" or "d".
With no quotes and inaccurate spacing it appeared as "Dord" and was entered into the dictionary.
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If one was siphoning between containers at different pressures it would work without gravity, whereas it would never work without some pressure on the fluid.
Thus I don't think this is a big enough error to hang an argument regarding fallability on.
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no attention span for the young
What are you, 12?
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Re: no attention span for the young
Uh, it has nothing to do with attention span. I read plenty of books. It had to do with the subject matter. There's enough to make for a long interesting article. But as a book, he ended up having to pad it to make it long enough, so there were lots of tangents and useless information added to reach book length.
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April Fools
Anyone with half a brain knows that a siphon will not siphon water over 34 feet high. Nothing but (atmospheric) pressure will push water against gravity up to the top - water doesn't magically "suck" itself uphill. And if you want to quibble about water boiling in a vacuum, do the experiment with mercury and substitute 29.94 inches (standard atmospheric pressure) for 34 feet. You cannot siphon mercury at all, not 1 inch high, in a vacuum.
The "quote" from the OED was a dead giveaway that this was an Onion-style story - they wouldn't promise to "correct" an entry based on the word of one person. I didn't think we were living in Idiocracy, but now I'm not so sure.
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siphoning
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Mike is WRONG, OED 100% correct (again)....
Except there are no errors, except for youre article, OED is 100% and have been for 99 years on this subject, and for you to use what you consider one 'error' in 100 years and comparing that to wikipedia is a joke.
If you had of spend the same amount of time thinking about how a siphon works that you did writing this 'factual article' you would not have written it.. im sure.
Yes, a siphon will not work in a vacuum, that is true, no question, fluids evaportate.
But a siphon uses a thing called the "Bernoulli's Equation", if you look at that equation you will not find "gravity" anywhere, you will find Pressure, density, volume etc, NO GRAVITY..
If fact a siphon works INSPITE of gravity, not because of it, gravity is the limiting factor of a siphon actually working or not. If the gravity is too high it wont work.
But it works just fine if the gravity is lower, and it works perfectly in zero gravity, all you need is pressure.
Sure, on earth most 'air pressure' is from the atmosphere, and is due to gravity.
But that is not the only source of 'air pressure' and gravity is not required in the equations.
So in the space station with zero gravity, but plenty of air pressure, a siphon would work perfectly, in fact the
'h' or maximum height that it could 'lift' (the hump) would be infinate. (no gravity to fight against).
So based on this, Mike, you as usual shoot from the hit without even what seems to be a second thought about the actual facts. And the ariticle is about accuracy !!!!. go figure...
Nice try thought, mabey you need to brush up on youre basic high school physics again.
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Re: Mike is WRONG, OED 100% correct (again)....
Odd, then, that the OED has said they're changing the entry. Isn't it?
So based on this, Mike, you as usual shoot from the hit without even what seems to be a second thought about the actual facts.
Darryl seems to be confused about how all this works. He seems to be assuming that I was the one claiming the OED was wrong, when I was repeating what others had said.
And the ariticle is about accuracy !!!!. go figure...
Indeed. And how experts get stuff wrong. If I did get it wrong (and, again, the OED doesn't seem to think so), then that would further prove my point, wouldn't it?
Nice try thought, mabey you need to brush up on youre basic high school physics again.
Only if you brush up on your logic.
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Where is the link
Then show me why a siphon would work in zero gravity !!!
(as it does)
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Re: Where is the link
Darryl, the internet has a neat way of working: stuff that's in blue and changes to a hand when your pointer hovers over it are links. All of my stories link to the original source. If you do that and click on it, you will find the full story, including the quote from the OED about changing the dictionary.
I'm willing to accept that the original story -- widely reported at this point -- is wrong. But, I find it odd that you attack me, rather than the OED who seems to admit that it is wrong as well.
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If you read the paper referenced in the Register article, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/31098/, it's even more obvious that this Oz fellow is either a total nutjob or a superb humorist - I'm still betting on the latter. He claims that the hydrogen bonds between water molecules form long strings with sufficient tensile strength to pull masses of water uphill, and that the strength of these bonds are such that they break at precisely the height (34 feet) supported by standard sea level atmospheric pressure. He neglects to explain, however, why the strength of the hydrogen bonds would decrease with increasing altitude :-). Or how they self-organize into this polymer-like string behavior rather than simply explaining water's high boiling temperature.
The story here is not whether OED is/was crowdsourced, it is the extent to which patent nonsense explodes into gospel in the blogosphere. "I never said that, I'm just quoting it" is the standard excuse. 'Scuse me, but I prefer old-fashioned journalism with critical thinking and corroborated sources. Even the National Enquirer has those.
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You mean "the register" ??
Oh wait, you dont have it, and thanks for the tip about mouse overs,,, I really did not know that.
And you still have not explained how the OED are wrong, when a siphon will work in zero gravity ?
You cant explain that because if you say something requires gravity to work, but that thing will work in zero gravity.
It does not take much brains to work out you are wrong and the OED is right.
But it's a nice excuse to try a bit of FUD..
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Re: You mean "the register" ??
"The OED entry for siphon dates from 1911 and was written by editors who were not scientists," explained Margot Charlton of the Dictionary's staff. Amazingly, it seems that in 99 years nobody had ever queried the definition.
The next edition of the OED will be corrected.
And, again, I already said that you may be right, and all of these reporters and the OED may be wrong, so not sure why you claim I'm still spreading FUD.
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