Erratum


An erratum or corrigendum is a correction of a published text. As a general rule, publishers issue an erratum for a production error and a corrigendum for an author's error. An erratum is most commonly issued shortly after its original text is published.

Errata sheets

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, "Errata, lists of errors and their corrections, may take the form of loose, inserted sheets or bound-in pages. An errata sheet is definitely not a usual part of a book. It should never be supplied to correct simple typographical errors or to insert additions to, or revisions of, the printed text. It is a device to be used only in extreme cases where errors severe enough to cause misunderstanding are detected too late to correct in the normal way but before the finished book is distributed. Then the errors may be listed with their locations and their corrections on a sheet that is tipped in, either before or after the book is bound, or laid in loose, usually inside the front cover of the book. "

CPU logic

Design errors and mistakes in a CPU's hardwired logic may also be documented and described as errata. One well-publicized example is Intel's "FDIV" erratum in early Pentium processors, known as the Pentium FDIV bug. This gave incorrect answers to a floating-point division instruction for a small set of numbers, due to an incorrect lookup table inside the Pentium chip.