Oxford Dictionary Botch Sparks Anger in Bangalore

Oxford University Press (OUP) has been forced to suspend the sale of one of its dictionaries after a reference to the city of Bangalore sparked anger in India.

OUP issued an apology for the errors and said it would pulp any remaining copies of The Concise Dictionary of World Place Names following complaints by local historians that comments made about the capital city of the southern state of Karnataka were wrong.

The dictionary had stated that the chief language of the city's population was Bengali, when in fact the official language of the state is Kannada.

Mistakes were also found in references to who founded Bangalore and when.

"We cannot tolerate the scant respect for Karnataka's history. We had written a letter to them [OUP] asking them to rectify the mistake and to withdraw the copies carrying wrong information," the secretary to Karnataka's government department of Kannada and culture, I M Vittal Murthy, was quoted as saying in the Khaleej Times Online.

The Times of India reported that protests were expected outside the local OUP office today.

However, on Friday, OUP, a department of the University of Oxford, issued a statement apologizing for the mistakes.

"OUP is deeply sorry about the errors that have been brought to our attention in The Concise Dictionary of World Place Names. We have frozen stock and stopped selling from our warehouse, and will be pulping the remaining copies," read the statement.

"We sincerely apologize for the offense that this error has caused and we would like to assure all concerned that we will be putting this right as a matter of extreme urgency.

The 600-page dictionary, edited by John Everett-Heath, a former military diplomat and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, claims to give the history, meaning and origins of country, region, island, city and town names from across the world. It was first published in 2005.