For five years, one of the most respected dictionaries in the English language contained a word that did not exist. It was printed with a pronunciation and a definition, sat quietly on the page between real entries, and meant nothing at all, because no human being had ever used it.
The word was «dord». According to the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary, published in 1934, it was a noun used in physics and chemistry, and it meant density. It looked perfectly respectable. It was a ghost.
The mistake began on the last day of July in 1931. Austin Patterson, the dictionary’s chemistry editor, sent in a small paper slip that read «D or d, cont./density». He meant something ordinary: that the letter D, capital or lowercase, could stand as an abbreviation for density, and belonged on the list of things that letter abbreviates. Dictionaries of that era set such entries with spaces between the letters, so «D or d» was meant to be read as three separate items.
Somewhere in the editorial chain, someone read the slip differently. The spaces closed up, «D or d» was run together into a single word, and «dord» was born, complete with an invented part of speech and a tidy definition lifted straight from the note. It slipped past the proofreaders and into print.
There it stayed until 1939, when an editor noticed that «dord» had no etymology, no history and no record of anyone ever saying it, which for a genuine word is close to impossible. The entry was quietly marked for deletion, and later printings scrubbed it out.
Lexicographers have a name for creatures like this: ghost words, entries that enter dictionaries through error rather than use. «Dord» is the most famous of them, and it leaves behind an oddly comforting lesson. Being printed in an authoritative book does not make something true. Sometimes the experts simply misread the handwriting, and a word made of nothing sits on the shelf for five years before anyone looks closely.
