diff --git a/src/nu/validator/htmlparser/impl/Tokenizer.java b/src/nu/validator/htmlparser/impl/Tokenizer.java
index a673a1a1..4428027b 100755
--- a/src/nu/validator/htmlparser/impl/Tokenizer.java
+++ b/src/nu/validator/htmlparser/impl/Tokenizer.java
@@ -3529,9 +3529,13 @@ private void ensureBufferSpace(int inputLength) throws SAXException {
 
                     if (candidate == -1) {
                         // reconsume deals with CR, LF or nul
-                        if (c == ';') {
-                            errNoNamedCharacterMatch();
-                        }
+                        // We can go ahead and emit an error here without
+                        // needing to do an "if (c == ';')" check, because if
+                        // we've gotten here, we've already examined enough of
+                        // string after the ampersand to determine that the
+                        // substring we've looked at so far doesn't match the
+                        // beginning of any known named character references.
+                        errNoNamedCharacterMatch();
                         emitOrAppendCharRefBuf(returnState);
                         if ((returnState & DATA_AND_RCDATA_MASK) == 0) {
                             cstart = pos;