Syphoner definition3/10/2023 ![]() The most up-to-date version of the OED defines a siphon as: "An extensive check of online and offline dictionaries did not reveal a single dictionary that correctly referred to gravity being the operative force in a siphon," Dr Hughes said. Inspired by this feat, he decided to write an article about the phyics of siphoning for use by science teachers, only to discover that every dictionary he consulted claimed it was atmospheric pressure, not gravity, that pushed liquid through a siphon tube. Dr Hughes says the siphon transferred 10 billion litres of water over two months without a pump. Dr Hughes stumbled on the error after seeing an enormous siphon at work in South Australia transferring the equivalent of 4,000 Olympic swimming pools from the Murray river into Lake Bonney. Surely in all that time somebody must have noticed?įinally somebody has: Dr Stephen Hughes, a physics lecturer at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. Apparently the OED has been getting it wrong since 1911. The prestigious Oxford English Dictionary and numerous online dictionaries say much the same. And yet according to the Guardian science desk's own coffee-stained Collins, a siphon is "a tube placed with one end at a certain level in a vessel of liquid and the other end outside the vessel below this level, so that atmospheric pressure forces the liquid through the tube and out of the vessel".
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