Heroes of the world of words

I should like to claim the credit for the Bloomsbury English Dictionary’s inclusion of the word carminative. It did not appear in the dictionary’s previous incarnation as the Encarta World English Dictionary in 1999, and I pointed out the omission at the time.

Perhaps finding that the words Encarta and World English did not sell dictionaries, the publishers are now selling a second edition in Britain under this nice new name, with ENGLISH in big capitals on the spine instead of ENCARTA. Unfortunately, many of its absurdities and errors have been retained. I wasn’t the only one who laughed at the first edition. The reviewer for the TLS mocked its definition of Oxford Movement as ‘a movement … that advocated a renewal of Roman Catholic doctrine and practice’. The risible definition remains.

So does the erroneous description of the little circle over an a, used in some Scandinavian languages, as an ‘angstrom’.