juridicial

English

Etymology

See Usage notes; alternatively from Latin iūridiciālis.[1]

Pronunciation

IPA(key): /ˌd͡ʒʊɹɪˈdɪʃəl/

Adjective

juridicial (not generally comparable, comparative more juridicial, superlative most juridicial)

  1. Of or pertaining to matters of law and justice or the office of a judge.

Usage notes

The epistemic status of the word juridicial—that is, whether or not it is a "real" word and if so, its exact historical nature—is probably such as to put it into the class of words that began as misapprehensions of other closely related words (that is, misapprehensions of their spelling, pronunciation, or, as in this case, both) but that have been used enough as to become, descriptively, "real" words that are synonyms of (and doublets of) the earlier ones. Thus this word may have been independently re-misapprehended, by multiple speakers, from the word juridical, through the phonetic influence of the near-synonym judicial, such that hasty readers glanced at the word juridical and misapprehended that it was written juridicial and pronounced /ˌd͡ʒʊɹɪˈdɪʃəl/—thus a spelling pronunciation of a misspelling born of hasty conflation of -ical with -icial to yield the same stress pattern as found in /ˌd͡ʒuˈdɪʃəl/. Meanwhile, however, the pronunciation of juridical, which is /ˌd͡ʒʊˈɹɪdɪkəl/, is different enough from /ˌd͡ʒuˈdɪʃəl/ that it reminds a careful reader/writer of the correct spelling of that word (just as surely as rid neither sounds like nor is spelled like dish). As with other words with similar types of origin, careful writers will prefer the word that is entered in multiple trusted dictionaries (in this case, juridical not juridicial), even if the other is (descriptively) not "wrong" and indeed "real", simply because the established word is unassailable whereas the one with the dubious status could distract readers for no worthwhile reason.

References
  1. John A. Simpson and Edmund S. C. Weiner, editors (1989), “†juriˈdicial, a.”, in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, →ISBN.
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