Not like caucus

I was just reading my Toronto Star, ever a rich source of spelling mistakes, and noticed a headline "Rowdy and raucus". What they meant was "raucous", but when I did a search on google for the misspelling, I was surprised to find almost half a million instances, so the Star  headline editors are not alone. The Latin etymon (that's a fancy - but much shorter - word meaning "word from which another word is derived") of "raucous" is in fact raucus, meaning "harsh or hoarse", and this is indeed the meaning that "raucous" had when it was first borrowed into English in the 1600s (and is still the sense of the French word rauque). The "boisterous, noisy; rowdy, disorderly, uproarious" sense is really quite recent, dating from the mid-1800s.
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