dord
Sign in to saveThe word dord is a dictionary error in lexicography. It was accidentally created, as a ghost word, by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster) in the New International Dictionary, second edition (1934). That dictionary defined the term as a synonym for density used in physics and chemistry in the following way: dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density.
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The word dord is a dictionary error in lexicography. It was accidentally created, as a ghost word, by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster) in the New International Dictionary, second edition (1934). That dictionary defined the term as a synonym for density used in physics and chemistry in the following way: dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density.
Philip Babcock Gove, an editor at Merriam-Webster who became editor-in-chief of ''Webster's Third New International Dictionary, wrote a letter to the journal American Speech'', fifteen years after the error was caught, in which he explained how the "dord" error was introduced and corrected.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “dord” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.