From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An excerpt from Webster's showing the non-existent
word "dord"
Dord is one of the most famous
errors in
lexicography, a word accidentally created by the
G. and C. Merriam Company's staff and included in the second
edition of its
New International Dictionary, in which the term is
defined as "density".
Philip Babcock Gove, an editor at
Merriam-Webster who became editor-in-chief of
Webster's Third New International Dictionary, explained
why "dord" was included in the dictionary in a letter to the
journal American Speech, fifteen years after the error
was caught.
On
July 31,
1931,
Austin M. Patterson, Webster's
chemistry editor sent in a slip reading "D or d,
cont./density." This was intended to add "density"
to the existing list of words that the letter "D" can
abbreviate. The slip somehow went astray, and the phrase "D or
d" was misinterpreted as a single, run-together word: dord.
(This was a plausible mistake because headwords on slips were
typed with spaces between the letters, making "D or d" look very
much like "D o r d".) A new slip was prepared for the printer
and a part of speech assigned along with a pronunciation. The
word got past proofreaders and appeared on page 771 of the
dictionary around 1934.
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 the adjacent entry "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 that this 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.
See also
Look up
Dord in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
-
Fictitious entry
-
Esquivalience
External links
-
"Dord" at Snopes.com
-
"Dord" at fun-with-words.com; quotes Gove article
Categories:
Fictitious entries |
Lexicography |
Words