An Obituary for a Word That Never Existed

An Unusual Obituary

DORD (1934–1947)

It is with considerable confusion that we announce the passing of dord, an English noun whose existence was never satisfactorily established.

The deceased enjoyed a respectable position in a major dictionary, possessed an official pronunciation, and was believed to mean density in physics and chemistry.

It had no known literary achievements. No surviving conversation required its services. No scientific discovery appears to have depended upon it. Its family history was unclear, its references were nonexistent, and its professional qualifications turned out to be a clerical misunderstanding.

Nevertheless, for several years, dord occupied a perfectly legitimate-looking place in Webster's New International Dictionary.

It was printed.

It was defined.

It was alphabetized.

The trouble began when somebody asked whether anyone had ever actually used it.

There are many possible reasons a word might fall out of use. It can become unfashionable, lose its purpose, be replaced by a newer expression or survive only in old books. English is full of once-common terms that now require an explanation.

Dord's problem was more fundamental.

It had never properly entered the language in the first place.

The historical record of this extraordinary non-event is unusually good. A scholarly account was published in 1954, followed by further linguistic research. We know how the mistake happened, when it was noticed and why an apparently urgent correction took so long to complete.

So let us observe the appropriate formalities.

Before burying a word that never lived, we ought to establish how it was born.

A Difficult Birth in the Abbreviations Department

The story begins in 1931 with a chemistry editor named Austin M. Patterson.

Patterson was working on material for the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, a substantial reference work published by G. & C. Merriam.

One of the tasks involved technical abbreviations.

Scientific language depends heavily on symbols and shortened forms. A full word can be useful in an explanatory sentence, but a formula may require only a letter.

The editor wanted to record the use of a capital or lowercase D as an abbreviation for density.

This was perfectly ordinary dictionary work.

A reference book does not contain only full-length words. It may also explain abbreviations, symbols, variant spellings and technical conventions. If scientists use a letter to represent a quantity, there is a reasonable case for recording that information.

Patterson prepared a card bearing the notation D or d, with instructions connecting it to density.

The intention was straightforward.

Two versions of the letter D could represent the same scientific concept.

Nobody needed to invent a new word.

The existing language was functioning adequately.

Unfortunately, the notation did not reach its intended destination in the dictionary's editorial process.

The card was treated as material for an ordinary alphabetical entry rather than a continuation of the abbreviations material. Somewhere in the subsequent handling, the distinction between the letters and the instruction joining them disappeared.

D or d became dord.

A small typographical accident had accomplished something that poets, advertisers and novelists sometimes struggle to achieve deliberately.

It had created a word.

Or rather, something that looked remarkably like one.

There was no committee announcing the birth. No grand ceremony. The editors were not attempting an experiment in artificial language creation.

A notation was misunderstood.

The machinery of dictionary production began treating the result as vocabulary.

And once the process had started, the mistake became surprisingly respectable.

The Promotion

Dord required very little encouragement to establish a career.

An ordinary dictionary entry needs certain features.

It requires a headword. A pronunciation may be supplied. The part of speech must be identified. A definition explains the meaning.

The editorial process gave dord these things.

Its apparent status as a noun was established. A pronunciation was supplied. The definition identified it as a technical term used in physics and chemistry.

It even acquired the kind of specialized meaning that discourages casual questioning.

Density.

A perfectly serious scientific concept.

If a dictionary had defined dord as the sound made by a disappointed refrigerator, somebody might have raised an eyebrow.

Density, however, sounded plausible.

Scientific vocabulary is full of terms that seem unfamiliar to people outside the relevant discipline. Most readers cannot be expected to recognize every technical noun in a large dictionary.

A word does not become suspicious merely because you have never encountered it.

That is precisely why the error worked.

Dord wasn't extravagant enough to attract attention. It had no improbable legend attached to it. It did not claim to describe an impossible animal, a lost civilization or a forgotten disease.

It simply sat among the other entries, presenting itself as a useful scientific term.

When the second edition appeared in 1934, dord had become part of the printed dictionary.

Its address was page 771.

Its neighbors included the entry for Dorcopsis, a genus of small kangaroos, and doré, associated with a golden color.

The fictional word was surrounded by genuine vocabulary.

There is something almost touching about this arrangement.

On one side, a real animal.

On the other, a real adjective.

In the middle, a noun that had been accidentally assembled from instructions.

Alphabetical order showed no prejudice. The dictionary gave all three a place to stand.

Dord had successfully passed through an editorial system designed to record the English language.

What it had not passed was a more basic test.

Nobody had established that the word existed outside that system.

An Entirely Uneventful Career

At this point, the obituary becomes difficult to write.

Ordinary biographies contain evidence of activity.

A person takes a job, moves to another city, publishes a book or quarrels with somebody important. Even an unremarkable career produces documents.

A word's biography is different, but it also leaves traces.

People write it down. They use it in sentences. Other people repeat it. Its meaning changes. It travels through communities and across generations.

Dictionary researchers look for precisely this kind of evidence.

An entry should be supported by actual use, not merely by the confidence of an earlier reference book.

Dord had the confidence.

It lacked the use.

Imagine searching scientific papers for examples.

You might expect to find a chemist writing about the dord of a liquid, or a physicist comparing the dord of two materials.

But the evidence necessary to establish such a specialized meaning was missing.

The dictionary itself was the central exhibit.

That creates an especially peculiar situation.

A reference book is supposed to describe language that people use.

Here, it appeared to be the principal reason anyone might believe a particular word was usable.

The source of authority had become the source of the error.

This does not mean dictionaries are generally unreliable. A substantial dictionary represents extraordinary editorial labor, and its entries are usually supported by research.

The lesson is much narrower.

A printed definition is not independent evidence of usage merely because it has been printed.

If an editor copies an unsupported entry from another dictionary, the entry may acquire another appearance without gaining another genuine witness.

Several books can agree with one another and still be repeating the same mistake.

Dord's particular history is especially comic because it did not need an elaborate conspiracy.

There was no known campaign to introduce the term into scientific language.

Nobody had to persuade university departments to adopt it.

A document moved into the wrong part of a publishing workflow, and subsequent work made it look legitimate.

For several years, it was possible to open a respected dictionary and encounter a scientific noun with no established scientific existence.

One imagines the awkwardness if the word had been required to complete an application form.

Occupation: Technical noun.

Field: Physics and chemistry.

Previous employment: None found.

References: Please consult the dictionary.

The application would have been impressive until somebody asked for evidence.

The Investigation of 1939

The questioning finally came in 1939.

An editor examining the dictionary noticed the suspicious entry and investigated its origin.

The available historical accounts identify a lack of supporting evidence as central to the problem. The entry did not have the documentation expected of a legitimate technical term.

The investigation led back through the editorial records.

And there, among the slips used to prepare dictionary entries, was the explanation.

The original instruction had referred to D or d as an abbreviation for density.

The word dord had not been submitted as a word.

It was the accidental product of misreading and transcription.

The case was solved.

The dictionary contained a ghost.

Not a mysterious new scientific term.

Not an archaic expression that had disappeared from ordinary use.

Not a piece of private technical jargon whose meaning had been lost.

Just an error.

The distinction matters because the phrase ghost word has a specific history in lexicography.

It does not simply mean a rare word or an old expression.

A ghost word is a form that has been recorded as vocabulary because of a mistake, despite lacking the independent usage required to justify its supposed status.

Dord was a remarkably tidy example.

We know the original abbreviation.

We know the mistaken transformation.

We know the printed result.

And we know that an editor eventually discovered the problem.

An unusual feature of the case is how much evidence survives about the mistake itself.

In 1954, dictionary editor Philip Babcock Gove published an account titled The History of “Dord” in the journal American Speech.

Later, linguist Allen Walker Read examined the surviving editorial records in his research on ghost words.

The word had produced no convincing scientific career, but its administrative history had become unusually well documented.

Perhaps this should be considered a form of achievement.

For a term that did not exist, dord generated a surprisingly substantial paper trail.

Urgent: Remove the Deceased

One might expect the story to end here.

The mistake was identified.

The dictionary publisher understood what had happened.

Surely removing the entry would be a straightforward matter.

Not quite.

In the era of metal printing plates, correcting a large printed dictionary was not equivalent to opening a document and pressing Backspace.

Changes involved physical production processes and the preparation of later impressions.

A correction was ordered in 1940.

Yet dord continued to survive in the printed record.

According to the historical study by Allen Walker Read, the change was not effectively completed until a renewed order in 1947.

In other words, the editorial team had identified the ghost, established how it had appeared and decided it should be removed.

The ghost remained.

There is something magnificently bureaucratic about an imaginary word surviving an order for its own deletion.

It was not a matter of philosophical disagreement.

There was no scholarly campaign defending dord as an essential part of scientific terminology.

The surviving records indicate an error that needed a production correction and did not promptly receive one.

A seven-year interval between the initial correction order and the renewed action is not a particularly flattering performance for a task marked as urgent.

But it is an excellent final chapter for the word.

Dord had entered the dictionary because instructions were mishandled.

It lingered because instructions were not fully carried out.

The same general weakness that had produced the entry helped prolong its existence.

This was a word whose entire biography depended upon administrative procedure.

Even its removal required paperwork.

By the time the correction was finally made, dord had enjoyed more years of documented dictionary existence than many deliberately invented words ever achieve in ordinary speech.

And it had accomplished this without being used in the scientific sense the dictionary attributed to it.

The obituary can now record its official demise.

The date is 1947.

The cause is correction.

But there is a problem.

Dord was not the first of its kind.

The Family Has Other Members

In 1886, almost half a century before dord appeared, English philologist Walter William Skeat had already introduced the term ghost word.

Skeat was concerned with forms that had entered reference works because of errors in reading, printing or interpretation.

He had encountered the problem while working with historical language, particularly material preserved in manuscripts and older texts.

The difficulty was considerable.

An editor studying an unfamiliar word in an old document has to decide what the original writer actually wrote.

Handwriting can be ambiguous.

Letters can resemble one another.

A later copyist may misunderstand an earlier form.

And if one scholar records a mistaken reading, another may accept it as genuine evidence.

The error begins to travel.

One famous example involved abacot.

For a time, dictionaries described an abacot as a particular kind of elaborate royal headwear.

It sounded impressively historical.

The supposed object had a definition and an identity. Some reference works even illustrated it.

The difficulty was that the word arose through a misunderstanding of bycocket, a genuine term for a kind of headdress.

The imaginary name had become more respectable than its origins deserved.

Skeat objected to such errors because they could enter the historical record as if they represented genuine vocabulary.

In a study of early English words, that is a serious problem.

A nonexistent form may lead researchers to invent explanations for something that never needed explaining.

Its spelling might suggest an imaginary origin.

Its definition might imply a cultural practice for which there is no independent evidence.

And once the mistake appears in enough dictionaries, it can look like a tradition.

The misleading confidence grows with every repetition.

This is the strange family to which dord belongs.

Its ancestors were not necessarily deliberate inventions.

They were accidents that acquired authority.

What makes the family unusual is the relationship between the error and the record.

A word normally enters a dictionary because it has been used.

A ghost word enters because the dictionary-making process has mistaken something else for use.

The reference work becomes a place where an editorial accident can masquerade as a linguistic fact.

Skeat identified the phenomenon long before the celebrated Webster's error.

Dord merely provided a particularly modern, conveniently documented example.

It was born in a world of index cards and printing plates rather than medieval manuscripts.

The mechanism was familiar.

An Important Distinction: Invented Is Not the Same as Imaginary

At this point, a reasonable reader may object.

People invent words all the time.

A novelist can create an expression for a fictional world. A group of friends may devise a ridiculous name for an everyday situation. A new technology can produce a need for terminology that did not exist a decade earlier.

Every word must have begun somewhere.

Why should dord be treated so harshly?

The answer lies in intention and evidence.

A newly coined expression can be a perfectly real linguistic event.

Somebody uses it.

The invention has a context.

Other people may adopt it, reject it or misunderstand it, but the expression has genuinely been produced.

Linguists sometimes use the term nonce word for a word created for a particular occasion.

Such a word may appear only once. That doesn't make the occurrence imaginary.

It was used.

A ghost word is different.

The supposed word may have entered a reference book because someone misread a text, mishandled an abbreviation or interpreted an error as vocabulary.

Its apparent historical life is not supported by the kind of evidence its definition claims.

Dord had never needed to mean density because scientific language already possessed the word density and the abbreviation that the original editor was trying to record.

The dictionary didn't capture a surprising act of linguistic invention.

It manufactured one accidentally.

But an intriguing possibility remains.

Could somebody deliberately begin using dord?

Certainly.

A group of writers could decide tomorrow that dord should mean an awkward pause during a conversation.

They could write stories containing the word. Other people might start repeating it. Over time, a genuine pattern of usage could emerge.

There is no rule preventing a formerly imaginary string of letters from developing a real meaning.

English does not operate a permanent blacklist of unfortunate editorial accidents.

Nevertheless, a new use would not retroactively prove that the 1934 dictionary entry had been correct.

Historical evidence has dates.

If a word begins being used after a printing error makes it famous, that is not evidence it was already established before the mistake.

And today, of course, dord does have a kind of afterlife.

It is discussed in articles about lexicography.

It appears in research about dictionary errors.

People use it as the name of the famous ghost word.

That is genuine discussion, but it should not be confused with the old claim that dord was an established scientific noun meaning density.

The original entry remains mistaken.

The story of the mistake has become real.

This makes the obituary unusually complicated.

The patient never lived in the way the medical records claimed.

But the medical records have become famous.

The Problem with a Very Convincing Page

The story of dord survives because it reveals a weakness that can affect any system devoted to organizing information.

A well-presented statement can be easier to trust than to investigate.

The dictionary entry had everything expected of its surroundings.

The lettering was correct.

The location was correct.

The subject label sounded appropriate.

It appeared between other legitimate entries in a respected publication.

Nothing on the page announced that the underlying evidence was missing.

A reader had no immediate reason to suspect the word's administrative history.

This is one of the risks of a reference work that borrows authority from its own structure.

The form communicates reliability.

A dictionary does not normally decorate unsupported claims with attractive formatting for entertainment. Its typography and organization are designed to help readers find dependable information.

That same professional presentation can make an exceptional error difficult to notice.

Historical lexicographers have long recognized the danger.

The Oxford English Dictionary's tradition of using dated quotations from actual texts is, in part, a way of grounding definitions in observable evidence.

An entry supported by real examples has something beyond another dictionary's agreement.

A researcher can inspect the evidence, examine the context and ask whether a meaning has been correctly interpreted.

That does not eliminate mistakes.

Sources may be ambiguous. Historical documents can be corrupted. Language can change in ways that are difficult to reconstruct.

But evidence gives the editor a way to test the claim.

Modern dictionary editors continue to work from recorded usage. Words are researched, their contexts examined and their meanings described rather than simply accepted because someone proposes them.

A dictionary does not normally make a word real by royal decree.

It records what language users have already done.

For dord, the process went in the opposite direction.

The record came first.

The supposed usage did not follow.

And this is why the word deserves a slightly different kind of obituary from an ordinary obsolete expression.

It did not fade away after generations of productive linguistic service.

Its credentials were discovered to be invalid.

Final Notice

We must now return to the formal announcement.

Dord, 1934–1947.

Born from an editorial misunderstanding.

Entered into a major dictionary with the appearance of a legitimate scientific noun.

Discovered to be an error in 1939.

Subject to a correction order in 1940.

Finally removed following renewed action in 1947.

Remembered in scholarly literature, newspaper articles and discussions of the peculiar history of dictionaries.

No verified career as a technical term meaning density has been established.

The deceased leaves behind a useful warning about the difference between an assertion and its evidence, though it would be unfair to suggest that dord deliberately intended to teach anybody a lesson.

It had no intentions.

It had no independent career.

It was four letters that found themselves in the wrong place and received an extraordinarily thorough professional introduction.

There will be no funeral.

There is no grave.

The original dictionary entry can be examined in surviving copies, and the circumstances of its appearance remain available to anyone interested in the history of language.

As for the obituary itself, it contains one final inconvenience.

In preparing it, we have used the name dord repeatedly.

We have given the word a title, a biography, several pages of discussion and yet another opportunity to appear in print.

A word that never existed as the scientific term it claimed to be is now perfectly capable of attracting attention as the name of an error.

It has survived in the one profession that knows exactly why it should not have survived.

The dictionary business.

The deceased, it seems, remains available for comment.