The Word That Changed Meaning Because of a Typo

In 1934, the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary went to press with a brand-new word in it: dord, a noun meaning density, used in physics and chemistry. It sat there, looking perfectly respectable, between Dorcopsis and doré. There was only one problem. There is no such word as dord. There never had been.

I love this story more than is probably reasonable, because it's a perfect little window into how words actually come to be - which is to say, far more messily than we like to imagine.

How dord was born

Here's what happened. An editor had sent a slip to the typists that read "D or d," meaning that the abbreviation for density could be written as a capital D or a lowercase d. In the dictionary trade, terms and their abbreviations were typed with spaces between the letters, so the slip was meant to be filed under abbreviations.

But somewhere along the line, the spaces were read as nothing at all. "D or d" became "Dord." A word was born from three letters and a misunderstanding, handed a part of speech, given a definition, and set loose in the most authoritative dictionary in America. It lived there, undisturbed, for five years, until an editor noticed in 1939 that dord had no etymology - no history, no root, no parents - and pulled the thread until the whole thing unraveled.

Lexicographers have a lovely name for creatures like this. They call them ghost words - entries that exist only because of an error, describing nothing in the real language, haunting the pages until someone spots them. Dord is the most famous ghost in the dictionary.

The accidents that stuck

Dord got caught. What fascinates me more are the mistakes that didn't - the errors that slipped into the language and simply stayed, until they stopped being errors and became the correct form.

Take the word pea. It shouldn't exist. The older word was pease, which was already singular - one pease, a bowl of pease (as in the nursery rhyme, "pease porridge hot"). But that final s sounded plural to English ears, so people assumed there must be a singular hiding inside it, and invented pea by chopping the s off. The whole word is the fossil of a grammatical misunderstanding, and now it's just what we call the vegetable.

The same thing happened at the front of words, through a mishearing of where one word ends and the next begins. An apron was once a napron. An umpire was a noumpere. The n quietly migrated across the gap from the noun to the article, and nobody ever migrated it back. A newt, going the other way, was once an ewt. These aren't corruptions we should tut at. They're just what the language decided, by accumulated accident, to keep.

Why the accidents tell the truth about language

There's a tidy story we tell ourselves about words - that they're designed, that each one was chosen for a reason, that meaning descends in an orderly line from some pure origin. The ghost words and the fossilized mistakes tell a truer story. Language isn't engineered. It's grown, and weathered, and worn smooth by millions of mouths, and a fair amount of what we've ended up with is the residue of somebody, somewhere, getting it slightly wrong.

I find that oddly comforting as a writer. It means there's no pristine, correct version of English that the rest of us are falling short of. The thing itself is a collaborative accident, still in progress. Pea was a mistake. Apron was a mistake. They're now unimpeachably real words, because the only thing that makes a word real is that enough people used it as though it were.

The one that got away

Dord, sadly, didn't get to stay. It was too obviously orphaned - a word with a definition but no history, and history is what betrayed it. Had a few physicists actually started saying "the dord of lead," it might have earned its keep and survived, a word that willed itself into existence out of a printing error. It came closer than you'd think. For five years it was in the book, as official as any word beside it.

And that's the quiet lesson under the funny story. The line between a real word and a mistake is thinner than we pretend. It isn't drawn by dictionaries, or by rules, or by etymology. It's drawn by use - by whether people pick the word up and carry it. Dord was a real word for exactly as long as people believed it was one. Which is, when you think about it, the only way any word is ever real.