Dord

Dord is possibly the most famous error in lexicography, occuring when the Merriam-Webster Company erroneously inserted the non-existent word in the second edition of its Webster's New International Dictionary. Fifteen years after the error was caught Philip Babcock Gove, an editor at Merriam-Webster, explained how the mistake came about in a letter to the journal American Speech.

On July 31, 1931, Austin M. Patterson, Merriam-Webster's chemistry editor sent in a slip reading "D or d, cont./density." This was intended to add "density" as part of the existing list of abbreviations under the letter "D". The slip somehow went astray and was mistaken as an entry as a word of its own, someone thinking "D or d" should be run together as a single word. A new slip was prepared for the printer and a part of speech assigned along with a pronounciation. The word slipped past proofreaders and appeared on page 771 of the dictionary around 1935.

On February 28, 1939, an editor noticed "Dord" lacked an etymology and investigated. Soon an order was sent to the printer marked "plate change/imperative/urgent". The word "Dord" was excised and the definition of "Dore furnace" was expanded from "A furnace for refining dore bullion to "a furnace in which dore bullion is refined" to close up the space. Gove wrote it was "probably too bad, for why shouldn't dord mean 'density'?"

References

• Philip Babcock Gove. "The History of 'Dord'". American Speech. Volume 29 (1954). Pages 136-138.