A book on Cornish antiquities from 1754 said that the current term in the Cornish language for a cromlech was tolmen ("hole of stone") and the OED says that "There is reason to think that this was the term inexactly reproduced by Latour d'Auvergne [sic] as dolmen, and misapplied by him and succeeding French archaeologists to the cromlech".
The Oxford English Dictionary does not mention "dolmin" in English and gives its first citation for "dolmen" from a book on Brittany in 1859, describing the word as "The French term, used by some English authors, for a cromlech ...".
However, it has been impossible to prove that these remains date from the time when the stones were originally set in place. The word dolmen entered archaeology when Théophile Corret de la Tour d'Auvergne used it to describe megalithic tombs in his Origines gauloises (1796) using the spelling dolmin (the current spelling was introduced about a decade later and had become standard in French by about 1885).
Ancient Stones of Dorset, 1996. == External links == World heritage site of dolmen in Korea Piccolo, Salvatore.
Department of Archaeology, University College Cork, 1997 == Further reading == Trifonov, V., 2006.
Available from Kudin, M., 2001.
Department of Archaeology, University College Cork, 1997 == Further reading == Trifonov, V., 2006.
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