Once again my logophile friend introduced me to this word: novercal. According to Hyperdictionary, it comes from a Latin word, novennis, meaning "of nine years." It means "recurring every ninth year."

Yet, it also means "pertaining to stepmother," from the Latin word novercalis, meaning "stepmother"?

Shouldn't it be one or the other?

quote:

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Shouldn't it be one or the other?

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This is English you are talking about, Kalleh!

That's just an error. Some modern on-line dictionary has got their lines confused and imported the sense of 'novennial' into the entry for 'novercal'.

The root is *new- 'new', not *now- 'nine'.

Thanks, aput! I was confused as to how step-mother and recurring every nine years could be related.

It begs the question, though...does that happen often with online dictionaries? I use them all the time!

The Webster's online dictionary, the Online Plain Text English Dictionary, and the Webster's 1913 Webster's Dictionary also include the "every nine years" part. They're all wrong?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

Oh, well that's where it comes from: half the on-line dictionaries are just copies of the out-of-copyright Webster 1913, and that's just packed with errors. It comes from faulty scanning, I presume. Most of them are typos, and if they occur in headwords, you get non-words created. I'm afraid that's very common: anything derived from Webster 1913 is highly untrustworthy.

I must admit this is the first I can recall seeing an entry transposed like that, but that ARTFL Project makes it obvious what's happened. Look at the etymologies:

Novercal
No*ver"cal (?), a. [L. novennis of nine years; novem nine + annus year.] Done or recurring every ninth year.
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Novercal
No*ver"cal (?), a. [L. novercalis, from noverca a stepmother.] Of or pertaining to a stepmother; suitable to, or in the manner of, a stepmother. Derham.

The main clue to wrong headwords is that only the pronunciation key (No*ver"cal) matches: subsequent mentions in etymology and quotations don't have the same error. You obviously can't get 'novercal' from novennis. I'd guess if you look in the same dictionaries for 'novennial' you won't find it. -- Oh yes you do, if you click on that page number 984 you see them in context, and Novennial is in there above with the exact same entry.

Just for a giggle I thought I'd see how far ahead I needed to look to find a fictitious word. On the very next page we find these in sequence:

Nucula
Nu"cu*la (?), n. [L., little nut, dim. of nux, nucis, a nut.] (Zoöl.) A genus of small marine bivalve shells, having a pearly interior.
Nucle
Nu"cle (?), n. [L. nucula a small nut.] (Bot.) Same as Nutlet.
Nucumentaceous
Nu`cu*men*ta"ceous (?), a. (Bot.) See Nucamentaceous

So they've lost the word nucule and created one nucle, and this error can be found all over the Web now. Another clue to what it should be is that their alphabetical order is always for the correct word, not for the scanning error.

Not all copies of Webster 1913 are identically wrong: sometimes you'll find corrected versions. But don't trust anything in this format.

I could play this game all day. The next non-word is on page
989:

Obdureness, n., Obduredness
Obbe
Obeah

Next page, we find:

Obituarily
Obiyuary
Obituary

and later on the same page:

Objectivity
Obectize
Objectless

On the following page we find a good example of headword and pronunciation wrong, but all subsequent uses of it in quotations and derivatives correct: Obnoxlous.

And I'm afraid that frequency of error does not surprise me.

I had no idea that any dictionary would have that many errors! The meanings were so diparate that I wondered about it. Yet, Richard tells us that there are hundreds of meanings for "set," so who knows!

As has been posted here, there are even (albeit few and far between) errors in the OED (e.g. "political football"). It seems to me a book about errors in dictionaries would be useful.

I knew some of the specialty online dictionaries are mere copies of each other (and most of them from Mrs. Byrne). But, I surely didn't think it the case with something like Webster's!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

Quote "...As has been posted here, there are even (albeit few and far between) errors in the OED (e.g. "political football"). ..."

My (slightly out of date) copy does not have a definition for political football - what is the error to which you refer?

As far as I know none of the errors are in the original 1913 dictionary (though I have a very low opinion of it qua dictionary) but all result from errors in electronic scanning to get it on the Web. Some look like automatically created errors, like Obnoxlous for Obnoxious, and the doubling in Obbe for Obe (this often happens across the stress/syllable marks); and others look like uncaught errors in human typing or retyping, as Obiyuary for Obituary.

what is the error to which you refer?
Richard, wordnerd first wrote about it in
this post. However, since then we have referred to it several times, including this one. As you can see, there are a couple others that we have found, too, and I am not referring to "epicaricacy."