Most dictionaries today tend to view their role as that of recorder of language, rather than watchdog. If enough people use a word in a certain fashion, whether rightly or wrongly, then lexicographers will dutifully note this usage. Cocoa is universally accepted in dictionaries as referring to “a powdered form of the ground cacao bean used to make chocolate,” yet it is nothing more than a poor spelling of cacao that somewhere along the line managed to be misspelled by enough people to gain legitimacy.
