Help the OED Find a Lost Book

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday May 8, 2013 @04:33AM from the doesn't-everyone-have-that-book dept.

New submitter imlepid writes "The Oxford English Dictionary is currently undergoing a complete overhaul which includes a reexamination of the 300,000+ entries and citations for those entries. Understandably for a work which is over 150 years old, some of the sources have become hard to find. One such example is a book titled 'Meanderings of Memory' by Nightlark, which is cited 49 times in the OED, including for some rare words. The OED's editorial team has appealed to the public, 'Have you seen a copy of this book?'"

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Re:Does it even really exist? by tgd · 2013-05-08 05:04 · Score: 4, Interesting

What if "Meanderings of Memory" never existed in the first place, but was made up by sloppy 19th-century OED editors when they couldn't find a real source? It's not as if this practice is unknown...
Maybe its like the fake roads that cartographers put into maps... anyone else who references it clearly copied the OED!