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The dictionary is full of nonsensical words.
Words like bumfuzzle.
Bumbershoot.
Cattywampus.
Collywobbles.
Dord.
Snickersnee.
Gardyloo.
Taradiddle.
Snollygoster.
Widdershins.
Gubbins.
And look at this one: bricks.
I mean seriously, what could that mean?
Believe it or not, though, they’re all real words…well, all but one.
Can you guess which is a fake?
Is it “snollygoster?”
Nope.
A snollygoster is a “shrewd, unprincipled person,” from the German schnelle Geister,
meaning quick spirits.
“Bumbershoot?”
Nope.
A bumbershoot is a weird nickname for umbrella.
Is it bricks?
Wrong again, that’s a real word meaning “something we refuse to make a YouTube video
on.”
The imposter, it turns out, is dord.
Don’t feel bad if you were fooled, though: so were the editors of the 1934’s Webster’s
New International Dictionary, Second Edition.
You see, when the smart brain word people were typing up what all the different squiggles
meant, in between Dorcopsis, which is a type of small kangaroo, and dore, which means having
a gold coating, they included a listing for dord, defined simply as “density.”
But the people at Webster’s had a problem: they were all nerds.
But also, dord was not a word.
So what happened?
Well, Webster’s First Edition, or Word War I, used to include abbreviations as their
own words—for example, km for kilometer would be its own entry, between kin and kneel—but
in 1931, for the Second Edition, Word War II, the wily wordsmiths decided to move abbreviations
to their own section in the back of the book.
One fine 1931 day, Webster’s chemistry editor sat in a black and white room, because color
hadn’t been invented yet, and wrote up a 3 by 5 card that read “D or d, cont/density,”
meant to communicate that either uppercase D or lowercase d were both abbreviations for
density in chemistry.
The “cont” was short for “continuous” to indicate there would be other things “D”
was short for, like the roman numeral 500.
But someone mistook “D or d” for a word: dord, added a pronunciation, slapped it in
the dictionary defined as density, and then went home to do whatever people did before
we invented TikTok.
And dord remained there until 1939, when an editor realized it had no etymology, and wrote
a card to correct the mistake… a card that was ignored until 1947, when another editor
noticed the mistake, wrote a new card, and finally, the dastardly dord was done.
Dord, though, is not unique.
In fact, every dictionary has at least one mistake: it’s in the M section, after mist.
But there are often others: older dictionaries, especially, were full of errors, as they often
got their new words just by reading other stuff—if they saw a strange new word pop
up in a widely published poem or book, they’d sort out a definition, slap it in, and collect
those sweet dictionary dollars without a second thought.
But sometimes, typos in published works would lead to dictionarians mistaking errors for
new words: words like “kime,” defined by many 19th century dictionaries as a Hindu
torture device, but which was actually just a typo of knife in the Edinburgh Review.
The same thing happened with “morse,” a misspelling of nurse in an edition of Sir
Walter Scott’s The Monastery.
Plus, several years ago, when the people over at Wendover Productions named their channel,
they accidentally hit W instead of B, and just look at what that led to.
In all of these cases, though, the typos didn’t end up creating real words—the error was
noticed, the word removed, and most people were too busy doing what people always do—fighting
wars, dying of preventable disease, inventing new ways to fry stuff—to have noticed in
the first place.
The honor of the only known, accepted word to be created solely by typo goes to… drumroll
please… expediate, which means “to hasten.”
It’s a real word, listed in the dictionary, and used in scientific journals and Senate
reports and this tweet by @Blahman24.
But, if you’re thinking, “that sure looks a lot like the word expedite, and it also
has the exact same definition,” congratulations, your brain is one sentence ahead of us.
You see, back in 1605, an English politician named Sir Edwin Sandys wrote expediate instead
of expedite in an essay, and the 1623 Oxford English Dictionary mistook that typo for a
new word.
This time, though, by the time the etymological mistake was realized, expediate had become
so commonly used that it was considered a legitimate word.
You see, the rules of language are only useful insofar as they help people communicate, which
means that if enough people start saying a word wrong, it turns out, they aren’t saying
it wrong anymore; they’ve actually just created a new word.
Much like a middle-aged white man or the United States of America, a misspelled word can fail
its way into success.
And this happens all the time, usually not because of errors by dictionaries, but errors
by people.
Take, for example, the word pea.
One pea was once a pease, derived from middle English.
If you had more than one slimy green mushball, you’d have peases.
But people kept hearing about eating pease and thinking it was the plural of pea… a
word that didn’t exist.
It would be like if you heard about glass and thought that referred to having more than
one gla.
But enough people started referring to a single pease as a pea, that pea became the accepted
word.
This plural confusion is also how we got “a cherry,” which was originally “a cherise.”
By the way, if you had a cherry allergy, originally, you would fneeze, until people started misreading
the long f as an s, creating sneeze.
There are also lots of words that developed because of confusion about “a” and “an”
before words.
Notch was actually “otche” but so many people misunderstood “an otche” as “a
notch” that the word changed.
Same with newt, which was “an ewt,” and nickname, which was “an eke name,” eke
meaning to lengthen.
The opposite process happened as well—orange was originally “naranj, but “a naranj”
got misunderstood as “an orange,” which also happened to “apron” which started
as “naperon.”
Plus, the snake we call an adder should actually be an anadder, but people apparently got tired
of sounding like they had a stutter while trying to communicate what had just poisoned
them.
In the end, it turns out that little mistakes can have a big impact on the world.
Other times, though big mistakes can have a little impact on the world: and that’s
how we ended up with my new Nebula Original, “Sam from Wendover Presents: A Very Good
Trivia Show, Presented by Sam from Wendover.”
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Jordan Harrod, or Dave from City Beautiful will be the one to take the most of my money.
And once you’re done, you should also check out CuriosityStream’s thousands of top-quality
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