Can you look up Dord for me in Webster's dictionary?

Posted by Mords1944 on December 15th, 2020

Although there have been many adaptations of this lexicographical tome, it was during the editing stages of the 1934 edition, commonly known as "Webster's Second" (the "second" referring to this version is the large-scale revision of the version from 1909 titled "Webster's New International Dictionary"), which happened one of the funniest things that happened to Webster's Dictionary (or any dictionary for that matter).

This edition of Webster would become perhaps the most respected to date, despite (or perhaps thanks to) the publication in 1961 of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, a book that saw many fairly liberal changes to the standard format, and the inclusion of certain "slang" words that resulted in massive criticism of Webster's Dictionary. But let's go back to 1934; Thomas A. Knott and William Allen Neilson spearheaded the edition of the holy book that year.

When editing any book, even the most careful and resourceful of fact-checking eyes can accidentally miss a small mistake or two. However, while this may mean little in most books, when the dictionary does it, you would think people would notice. And when the dictionary creates not just a typo but an entirely new word, you would surely think this would catch someone's eye at some point. However, for a full five years a word existed in Webster's 1934 version that was not a word at all, but rather an error arising from what was supposed to be an abbreviation for the word "density."

When an editor at Webster discovered the error in 1939, he began a search to get to the root of this fictitious word, as he had never encountered "dord" before. What was discovered is that in July 1931, a Webster chemistry editor submitted a definition for the word density that read "" D od, cont./density. "It was the intention of the submitter that the word" density "be added. to the last set of words for which the letter "D" can be used as an abbreviation. However, somehow this definition was not tied to word density, somebody believed that "dord" was their own word! A vernacular error that went unnoticed by the proofreaders when they reviewed page 771 of that edition.

What was supposed to be included in the abbreviations section of the dictionary at the end of the book became a very real word. This is largely the fault of the stylist editor at the time he received the submission in the first place. Instead of placing the word "o" (as in "D or d") in italics, which would have indicated that the letters should be abbreviations, a wavy line was drawn underneath. This error meant that the "D or d" would become bold, as is the form of an entry for a word, along with the "Physics and Chemistry" label. Small mistakes later turned the word into a noun, resulting in "dord" becoming his own word.

However, in 1939, when it was discovered that dord was not an authentic word, it was yanked out just as silently as it had been written on the pages of William Webster. A ghost word that was around for five years, yet no one in the general public is recorded to have noticed the error, testament to how many values ​​we actually put into Webster's Dictionary.