What do you think of this fact?
Dictionaries are supposed to be the final authority on language. If it’s in there, it’s a word. So it’s pretty embarrassing when a word is in there that nobody has ever used.
A card in the wrong pile
In 1934, the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary came out, one of the most important dictionaries in the US. On page 771, between “Dorcopsis” and “doré,” sat an entry: “dord,” a noun used in physics and chemistry, meaning density.
The problem: that word didn’t exist. According to Snopes, here’s what happened. For the new edition, abbreviations were moved to their own section at the back of the book. An index card marked “D or d, cont./density” was supposed to end up with those abbreviations. The idea was that a capital or lowercase D can stand for density.
But the card slipped into the pile of regular words. There, “D or d” got set as a single word: dord. No origin, no example, but a definition all the same.
Five years undetected
The entry made it through every round of proofreading. Only in 1939 did an editor notice that “dord” had no etymology at all. He checked the files and uncovered the mistake. The word was dropped from later printings, and according to Mental Floss it was completely gone by 1947.
Since then, “dord” has been the go-to example of a “ghost word”: an entry created purely by mistake that was never actually in use.
Some dictionaries even plant fake words on purpose to catch copycats. The New Oxford American Dictionary invented “esquivalience” for this, supposedly meaning “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.”
What it says about language
The story shows how dictionaries really get made: not by divine inspiration, but by people, slips of paper and piles. And sometimes all it takes is one misfiled card for a word to officially exist for five years.
Even the thickest dictionary is only as good as its filing system.