Abacot

A  A royal cap of state, made in the shape of two crowns, and anciently used by the Kings of England. The actual word for this item is bycoket. The initial occurrence of abacot was in Edward Hall's Chronicle of 1548, and occurred as a serious misprint. It was copied verbatim by Raphael Holinshed (Chronicles of 1577), and then by a number of chronicle and dictionary editors over time, and eventually appeared in the 1771 Encyclopędia Britannica. The origin of this word was revealed in the Athenaeum in February 1882, by the famous Oxford English dictionary editor, James Murray.

The chain of mistranscriptions and misprints leading to the "creation" of this word is reputedly:

a "bycoket" -(World Wide Words describes the original real word as meaning "a cap or headdress with a peak both in front and behind, whose name derives from an Old French term for a small castle crowning a hill.")

a bicoket

abocoket

abocoke

abacot

[From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]