Primary
''sic'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250819014918-00-⌔
sic - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Adverb
sic (not comparable)
- Thus; as written; used to indicate, for example, that text is being quoted as it is from the source.
- ✤ When it is all over they merge and go in a body to visit […] the Telegraph Office – with plausible expressions of regret and excuses for the mob ‘which’ they say ‘is deplorably ignorant and will not be restrained when its feelings are strongly moved’ – sic, the fact being that the mob’s feelings will never be ‘moved’ unless it is by one of them.1
- ✤ Bolinger, Dwight (1977) ‘Pronoun and repeated nouns.’ Lingua 18:1-34 [Quoted sic in Toolan 1990. Neither in Lingua 18, nor in the 1977 volume of that journal.]2
- ✤ Joseph Wright, his predecessor in the chair, called him ‘a firstrate Scholar and a kind of man who will easily make friends’ at Oxford (quoted, sic, in E.M. Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (1932), p. 483).3
- ✤ Jim’s Interests: General: Working out, hanging out at the local bars, expanding my mind, eating Tuna Sandwhiches…or so I’m told and poker… Television:… this show that’s on Thuresday nights at 8:30pm… I can’t place the name of it but it has this crazy interview style thing…[all sic]4
- ✤ whole bussiness: Quoted sic in George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945)5
- ✤ In the posting, Matthews said he wished that, “more blacks [sic] people would look into ancient beliefs of pre Christian Africa.”6
- (by extension) Used in the manner of scare quotes
- ✤ In the past few months, we in Upstate N.Y. have been subjected to fire bombings, firings, verbal and physical harassment, etc. The list goes on and on. These (sic) Christians are calling for a million marchers and may very well get that many.7
Verb
sic (third-person singular simple present sics, present participle siccing, simple past and past participle sicced)
- To mark with a bracketed sic.8
- ✤ The fact is, of course, that the modern reviewer’s taste is not really shocked by half the things he sics or otherwise castigates, but he must find something to say and above all make a slow of purism.9
Verb
sic (third-person singular simple present sics, present participle siccing, simple past and past participle sicced)
- (transitive) To incite an attack by, especially a dog or dogs.
- (transitive) To set upon; to chase; to attack.
- ✤ * Sic ’em, Mitzi.*
Pronunciation
Etymology 1
Learned borrowing from Latin sīc (“thus, so”).
Etymology 2
Variant of seek.
Printed 2026-06-28.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1909 January 28, H. E. Wilkie Young, “Notes on the City of Mosul” (despatch No. 4), in Foreign Office, volume 195, number 2308; quoted in Elie Khadouri[e], “Mosul in 1909”, in Middle Eastern Studies , volume 7, number 2, 1971, →JSTOR, page 229: ↩
2003, Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, Routledge, →ISBN, page 468: ↩
2006, Christina Scull with Wayne G. Hammond, JRR Tolkien companion & guide, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN: ↩
2010, Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, Peter Lang, →ISBN, page 127: ↩
2012, Milton J. Bates, The Bark River Chronicles: Stories from a Wisconsin Watershed, Wisconsin Historical Society, →ISBN, page 271: ↩
2019 April 12, Paul P. Murphy and Samira Said, “Louisiana arson suspect expressed disgust with Baptist churches on Facebook”, in CNN , archived from the original on 2 November 2021: ↩
1979 December 29, Vern Hall-Smith, “Fundamentalists March”, in Gay Community News, volume 7, number 23, page 5: ↩
“sic, adv. (and n.)” Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition 1989. Oxford University Press. ↩
1887 May 7, E. Belfort Bax, “On Some Forms of Modern Cant”, in Commonweal : ↩
1992, Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown , →ISBN: ↩
2019, Brian Merchant, “Click Here to Kill: The dark world of online murder markets”, in Harper’s Magazine , volume 2020, number January: ↩
Secondary
• • •