Abacot, a spurious word which by a remarkable series of blunders has gained a foothold in the dictionaries. It is usually defined as "a cap of state, wrought up into the shape of two crowns, worn formerly by English kings." Neither word nor thing has any real existence. In Hall's "Chronicles" the word bicocket (Old French bicoquet, a sort of peaked cap or head-dress) happened to be misprinted abococket. Other writers copied the error. Then Holinshed improved the new word to abococke, and Abraham Fleming to abacot, and so it spun merrily along, a sort of rolling stone of philology, shaping itself by continual attrition into something as different in sense as in sound from its first orginial, until Spelman landed the prize in his "Glossarium," giving it the definition quoted above. So through Bailey, Ash, and Todd it has been handed down to our time,--a standing exemplar of the solidarity of dictionaries, and of the ponderous indolence with which philologers repeat without examining the errors of their predecessors. Nay, the error has been amusingly accentuated by calling in the aid of a sister art that has provided a rough wood-cut of the mythical abacot, which in its turn has been servilely reproduced.