of Shakspere, and was a mere temporary hallucination of memory. There are some other curious mistakes, which must, I suppose, have crept in either in the course of transcription or of printing. As specimens I mention two, because they have unfortunately perverted ordinary usage. The two words Coco and Cocoa—the former a Portuguese word[1], naming the coco-nut, the fruit of a palm-tree; the latter a latinized form of Cacao, the Aztec name of a Central American shrub, whence we have cocoa and chocolate—were always distinguished down to Johnson's time, and were in fact distinguished by Johnson himself in his own writings. His account of these in the Dictionary is quoted from Miller's Gardener's Dictionary and Hill's Materia Medica, in which the former is spelt coco and the latter cacao and cocoa. But in Johnson's Dictionary the two words are by some accident run together under the heading cocoa, with the disastrous result that modern vulgar usage mixes the two up, spells the coco-nut, 'cocoa-' as if it were co-cō-a, and on the other hand pronounces cocōa, the cacāo-bean and the beverage, as if it were coco. The word dispatch, from It. dispaccio, had been in English use for some 250 years when Johnson's Dictionary appeared, and had been correctly spelt by everybody (that is by everybody but the illiterate) with dis-. This was Johnson's own spelling both before and after he published the dictionary, as may be seen
- ↑ Pg. coco, a grinning mask, applied to the coco-nut because of the three holes and central protuberance at its apex, suggesting two eyes, a mouth, and nose.
