The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

WORDS ARE CREATED BY ERROR. One kind of these is called ghost words. The most famous of these perhaps is dord, which appeared in the 1934 Merriam-Webster International Dictionary as another word for density. In fact, it was a misreading of the scribbled “D or d,” meaning that “density” could be abbreviated either to a capital or lowercase letter. The people at Merriam-Webster quickly removed it, but not before it found its way into other dictionaries. Such occurrences are more common than you might suppose. According to the First Supplement of the OED, there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries that owe their existence to typographical errors or other misrenderings. For the most part they are fairly obscure. One such is messauge, a legal term used to describe a house, its land, and buildings. It is thought to be simply a careless transcription of the French ménage.