The word faction is considerably less frequent in spoken English than fraction; indeed, faction is generally restricted to more educated speakers and writers. I myself recall first learning the word as a junior in high school (when I was 16 years old), in an American history class discussion of James Madison’s Federalist paper number 10. The word faction is definitely an “adult” word. This is particularly clear in Word Frequency Book, edited by John B. Carroll, Peter Davies, and Barry Richman (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), which gives the frequencies of words in published texts written for grade-school children. There the word fraction occurs 100 times more frequently than faction. According to more general samplings of texts from American English, fraction occurs about four times more frequently than faction; see, for instance, the current count from and the earlier one in the Brown Corpus (dating from the early 1960s), as found in W. Nelson Francis and Henry Kucˇera, Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982). But in more literary and historically based databases, such as the online Oxford English Dictionary and Literature Online , we get about equal frequencies for fraction and faction.
Here in Alma 58:36, Oliver Cowdery definitely wrote fraction in the original manuscript. Either he or Joseph Smith in his dictation seems to have been unaware of the difference between fraction and faction and thus substituted the more common word, fraction, for faction. This confusion continued when Oliver copied this word into the printer’s manuscript, initially writing the impossible fartion, then correctly inserting the c but without deleting the r (thus producing the equally impossible farction), which leads one to think that once more Oliver intended the word fraction. The 1830 typesetter correctly emended the word to faction, and all subsequent editions have followed the 1830 reading.
Although fraction will theoretically work in Alma 58:36, its use there is really quite unusual. In various historical databases of the English language, the words fraction and government rarely collocate and then only accidentally. For instance, the online Oxford English Dictionary has only one instance of fraction and government occurring within ten words of each other, but that example refers to the government using “the last fraction of the sum reserved for the redemption of the public debt”. In contrast, the online OED lists eight instances of faction collocating with government, and there the examples use faction like it is used here in Alma 58:36, as in the following:
Even more striking are the rare instances of the specific phrase “fraction in the government” on , with only three examples when accessed on 23 July 2007:
The first example of fraction appears to mean ‘proportion (of people)’ and can be considered a correct use of the word fraction (although unusual). In the second example, the word fraction seems to mean ‘fracture’, while the third example appears to be an actual instance where fraction means ‘faction’. The last two examples seem to have been written by nonnatives. In contrast, gives an overall estimate (although unreliable except in the broadest measure) of tens of thousands for the specific phrase “faction in the government”.
It therefore seems very doubtful that “some fraction in the government” is the correct reading for Alma 58:36 in the original text of the Book of Mormon. We have already seen a number of cases where Oliver Cowdery (or perhaps Joseph Smith) substituted a more common word for an unfamiliar one; see the discussion and list of examples under Jacob 6:13. The critical text will accept faction as the correct reading here in Alma 58:36.
Summary: The word faction in Alma 58:36 is most probably the reading of the original text, even though the original manuscript reads fraction (a possible but unlikely reading); it appears that at the time of the translation, Oliver Cowdery (if not Joseph Smith) was unfamiliar with the word faction and substituted fraction for it.