Definition of "sic"

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.

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, page 229

Bolinger, Dwight (1977) ‘Pronoun and repeated nouns.’ Lingua18:1-34

2003, Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, Routledge, page 468

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).

2006, Christina Scull with Wayne G. Hammond, JRR Tolkien companion & guide, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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]

2010, Paul Booth, Digital Fandom: New Media Studies, Peter Lang, page 127

whole bussiness: Quoted sic in George F. Willison, Saints and Strangers (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1945)

2012, Milton J. Bates, The Bark River Chronicles: Stories from a Wisconsin Watershed, Wisconsin Historical Society, page 271

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.

1887 May 7, E. Belfort Bax, “On Some Forms of Modern Cant”, in Commonweal‎

Phreaks can max-out 911 systems just by siccing a bunch of computer-modems on them in tandem, dialling them over and over until they clog.

1992, Bruce Sterling, The Hacker Crackdown‎

I was interviewing the victims of a harebrained scheme to sic contract killers on an innocent woman

2019, Brian Merchant, “Click Here to Kill: The dark world of online murder markets”, in Harper’s Magazine‎, volume 2020, number January