Scribe 3 of 𝓞 here in 1 Nephi 8:13 wrote “around about”. Later on in the chapter, we have the same expression:
When copying these passages into 𝓟, Oliver Cowdery changed “around about” to “round about”. In the current Book of Mormon text, there are 87 occurrences of “round about” and none of “around about”. Although the current text has only “round about”, there are many examples in the original manuscript of Oliver Cowdery initially writing “around about” and then correcting it to “round about”. Out of 30 other extant occurrences in the original manuscript, all in Oliver’s hand, he initially wrote “around about” 9 times but then in each case corrected the text to “round about”. And for six of these (interspersed from Alma 48:8 through Alma 53:4), he corrected around by erasing the initial a, thus showing that most of his corrections were immediate. For the three other corrections, we have the following in the transcript of 𝓞:
The last example appears to be a later correction; not only is the correction in heavier ink flow, but Oliver also supralinearly rewrote the entire word.
In the printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery wrote “round about” 82 times and every time without any correction. (Scribe 2 of 𝓟 copied the phrase 5 times—and also without any correction.) Not once in 𝓟 did Oliver accidentally write “around about”. This highly significant difference between the two manuscripts suggests that Oliver Cowdery himself strongly preferred “round about” over “around about”. And in 𝓟 (here in 1 Nephi 8) he also emended scribe 3 of 𝓞’s two occurrences of “around about” to “round about”. His correction in 𝓞 of Ether 9:35 appears to be a later emendation because of how it was corrected.
What caused Oliver Cowdery to accidentally write “around about” so many times in 𝓞 but not in 𝓟? The answer is that Joseph Smith must have frequently (and maybe always) dictated the phrase as “around about”. Thus scribe 3 of 𝓞 wrote down “around about” since he, like Joseph, saw nothing wrong with it. But Oliver kept trying to avoid writing down “around about” in 𝓞, but succeeded without any error only about two-thirds the time (based on the extant occurrences). All of this suggests that Joseph originally dictated “around about” at least part of the time. It is of course possible that Joseph actually saw only “round about” in the interpreters or the seer stone but nonetheless pronounced it as “around about” according to his own speech.
The King James Bible has only “round about” (307 times). Only one of the Book of Mormon examples is a biblical quote (1 Nephi 21:18, quoting Isaiah 49:18). The Oxford English Dictionary explains that both the 1611 Bible and Shakespeare’s plays had only “round about” and that before 1600 “around about” was rare. The OED also describes American English as being more prone than British English to replace round with around in expressions. (Note that in the 1906 LDS large-print edition, printed in Salt Lake City, the typesetter accidentally set “around about” in 1 Nephi 8:26.) The online OED (as of 19 December 2002) lists 445 citations of “round about” (this statistic includes a few cases of repetition) but only two of “around about”, one by a famous American writer and the other from a newspaper in Northern Ireland:
Mark Twain, Century Magazine, February 1885
There’s always cobs around about in a shuck tick, and they poke into you.
Belfast Telegraph, 17 January 1977
So around about 11 pm ...I mooched off to bed.
Once more we appear to have a phrase in the Book of Mormon that may involve scribal overlay. There are three possibilities for how the phrase “(a)round about” read in the original text: (1) consistently as “round about”, which Joseph Smith tended to read off as “around about”;
(2) consistently as “around about”, which Oliver Cowdery edited to “round about”; or (3) some variability between the two extremes.
As far as the critical text goes, the least speculative solution is to follow the earliest textual sources for each instance of “(a)round about”. This decision will retain “round about” in nearly all cases. Immediate corrections in 𝓞 (such as the six cases involving erasure) will be accepted as the reading of the original text. Only three cases of “around about” will be restored: the two in the hand of scribe 3 of 𝓞 (1 Nephi 8:13 and 1 Nephi 8:26) and the one in Ether 9:35 that Oliver Cowdery later corrected with heavier ink flow (by first crossing out the entire around and then supralinearly rewriting it as round ).
Summary: In accord with the earliest textual sources, restore “around about” in 1 Nephi 8:13 and 1 Nephi 8:26 as well as in Ether 9:35.