Word of the Day

: October 10, 2013

corrigendum

noun kor-uh-JEN-dum

What It Means

: an error in a printed work discovered after printing and shown with its correction on a separate sheet

corrigendum in Context

The day after running the article, the newspaper printed a corrigendum stating that the actress had been born in 1971, not 1871 as indicated.

"In summary, the scientific literature is self-correcting through corrigenda and through reader comments. Corrections of various kinds appear at the rate of one to two per hundred journal articles, compared to which the rate of forced retractions is negligible."- From an article by Joseph F. Grcar in American Scientist, Jan.-Feb. 2013

Did You Know?

If you guessed that "corrigendum" might be connected to the word "correct," you are quite right. Both "corrigendum" and "correct" derive from the Latin verb "corrigere," which means "to correct." The noun "corrigendum" and its plural "corrigenda" came to us unaltered from Latin in the early 19th century. The verb "correct" is much older; it has been part of our language since at least the 14th century.