A beast, the lusetan or ounce?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 7/14/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On 7/14/06, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> >
> > What word today is lusetan, as in "the beasts of the country are
> > bears, lusetans or ounces [etc.]", from 1720?
>
> OED gives "luseran" as a variant of "lucern", an archaic term for the lynx.

So it would follow that "ounces" is a possible misprint/scanning error
for "lynces"/"linces".


--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org