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Podcast: Today In History with The Retrospectors
Episode: Dord: The Ghost Word
Description: Rerun: Webster’s New International Dictionary (Second Edition) was the largest book to be mass produced, but - as was revealed on 28th February, 1939 - it contained an embarrassing error: on page 771, between the entries for Dorcopsis (a type of small kangaroo) and doré (golden in colour), was the word ‘dord’. Which doesn’t exist. The mistake had arisen from a note submitted by the dictionary’s Chemistry Editor, Austin M. Patterson, who had intended to include ‘D or d’ as an abbreviation for ‘density’. It became the most celebrated example of a ‘ghost word’.In this episode, Arion...