Dord is the supposed word whose inclusion in Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition became one of the most famous errors in lexicography. The notation "D or d" had been intended to call for including an additional meaning of the letter D, when used as an abbreviation, among those usable both capitalized and not; instead the four letters were construed as a word.
Philip Babcock Gove, an editor at Merriam-Webster, explained how it came about 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 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 pronunciation. 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'?"
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Last updated: 10-23-2005 13:59:08
