Meaning of lapsus oculi | Babel Free

Definitions

An error that results from looking in the wrong place, especially one that occurs while copying or translating a body of text.

formal, rare

Equivalents

Examples

“Oh, a mere lapsus oculi. The Doctor's optics were not quite so sound, as he imagined.”

“[T]he name Tetragonopterus was due to a lapsus oculi of [Georges] Cuvier and never appeared in that form till 1815; […]”

“Well, if what he runs into is the comely member, all may turn out for the best, as more than one romance has burgeoned in a Cottage Hospital. If, on the other hand, it is the local reservoir or a passing pantechnicon, he will probably regret his lapsus oculi (I think).”

“It has been carelessly copied and contains many lapsus oculi: frequently a single word has been omitted, obviously through inattention; occasionally a line or two of the archetype has been skipped, so that completely separate sentences have been fused together; sometimes simple mis-readings occur.”

“The straightforward and economical explanation of this mistake is a lapsus oculi on the part of the mason triggered by the structural similarity in his draft of the local freak beta and the mu which immediately followed it.”

Bulletin of the Association of Friends of the National Museum of Reggio Calabria

“Was it a simple lapsus oculi on the part of the translator, a kind of scribal error that led to an involuntary deletion?”

“These lapses have adversely affected passages of the Daniel–Three Youths texts that once shared more than a dozen lines of verses, lines which now appear to have been lost due to a textual lacuna in one witness or the other. In each case, the lapse at issue arguably involves a textual loss occurring as a result of scribal inattention, specifically the sort of lapsus oculi that will be termed 'eye-skip' in subsequent discussion.”

CEFR level