Ammon Shea spent one year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary for his upcoming book Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. The result is a compendium of absurd entries in the OED.

In a rather unconventional bit of lexicography the word scindapse has no definition at all, but there is a nice little etymology which informs the reader that it comes from a Greek word which means ‘a ‘thingumbob’, a what-d’ye-call-it.’

I’ll confess that on several occasions I thought that the editors of the OED were having a joke at the reader’s expense. The entry for unpoetic gives no definition, but there is a note that tells the reader to ‘cf. next.’ The reader dutifully looks ahead to the next entry which is unpoetical, the definition of which reads ‘cf. prev.’

You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>