Bibliobibuli

Got a couple of words for you.

The first is the one in this post’s title. This is:

…a word coined by H. L. Mencken which means “people who read too much and so are generally oblivious to the world around them.”

Many of you probably know such people.

And then there’s dord. Yes: dee-oh-are-dee. Dord.

What an odd word, you’re thinking. It certainly doesn’t look like English. Well, it looks kinda like word. Especially if I tell you it’s a noun, meaning “density.”

There’s just one catch: it’s pretty much impossible to use it in a sentence — at least, if you’re not discussing dord AS a word. Why? Because it doesn’t exist.

Now, if you think about it, words which don’t exist aren’t very remarkable. They outnumber by far the words which do. The folks at the Oxford English Dictionary (after some heming and hawing) estimate that English currently has around a quarter-million words. But if you add in, say, sgdkljsl and retopuppppppp — almost anything, for that matter, spouted by one of those little word-verification things which enable you to post blog comments — well, you’re probably looking at numbers in the billions.

But unlike other nonexistent words, dord has the singular distinction of having once appeared in a dictionary, the 2nd edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary. From Herbert C. Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third:

When the guidelines for etymology in Webster’s Third were nearing completion, [editor Philip] Gove took time out to add the story of dord to the lore of how things can go wrong in dictionary making. Dord was a word that had appeared spontaneously and had found a quiet niche in the English language two decades earlier. It was recorded in Webster’s Second in 1934 on page 771, where it remained undetected for five years. It disappeared from the dictionary a year later without ever having entered common parlance. The facts, which had been established years earlier through a search of company files, were as follows, as abridged from Gove’s explanation.

The lack of an etymology for dord, meaning “density,” was noted by an editor on February 28, 1939, when he was perusing the dictionary. Startled by the omission, he went to the files to track down what had happened and what needed to be done. There, he found, first, a three-by-five white slip that had been sent to the company by a consultant in chemistry on July 31, 1931, bearing the notation “D or d, cont/ density.” It was intended to be the basis for entering an additional abbreviation at the letter D in the next edition. The notation “cont,” short for “continued,” was to alert the typist to the fact that there would be several such entries for abbreviations at D.

A change in the organization of the dictionary possibly added to the confusion that followed. For the 1934 edition, all abbreviations were to be assembled in a separate “Abbreviations” section at the back of the book; in the previous edition words and abbreviations appeared together in a single alphabetical listing (which is how they again appeared in the Third Edition.) But after the original slip was typed for editorial handling, it was misdirected. Eventually, it came to be treated with the words rather than with the abbreviations.

Th editorial stylist who received the first typed version should have marked “or” to be set in italics to indicate that the letters were abbreviations (D or d). But instead, she drew a continuous wavy line underneath to signify that “D or d” should be set in boldface in the manner of an entry word, and a label was added, “Physics & Chem.” Since entry words were to be typed with a space between letters, the editorial stylist may have inferred that the typist had intended to write d o r d; the mysterious “cont” was ignored. These errors should have been caught when the word was retyped on a different color slip for the printer, but they were not. The stylist who received this version crossed out the “cont” and added the part-of-speech label n for noun.

“As soon as someone else entered the pronunciation,” Gove wrote, “dord was given the slap on the back that sent breath into its being. Whether the etymologist ever got a chance to stifle it, there is no evidence. It simply has no etymology. Thereafter, only a proofreader had final opportunity at the word, but as the proof passed under his scrutiny he was at the moment not so alert and suspicious as usual.”

The last slip in the file — added in 1939 — was marked “plate change imperative/urgent.” The entry was deleted, and the space was closed up by lengthening the entry that followed. In 1940 bound books began appearing without the ghost word but with a new abbreviation. In the list of meanings for the abbreviation “D or d” appeared the phrase “density, Physics.” Probably too bad, Gove added, “for why shouldn’t dord mean density?”

The information on both bibliobibuli and dord comes to us courtesy of Jeff Miller’s highly idiosyncratic Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia. (Another of those sites I once just trotted into while seeking relief from the Web’s constant rainfall.) By any measure, idiosyncratic or otherwise, this is quite a collection. Miller hasn’t put a lot of effort into making the resource with whiz-bang design principles, but it’s a fun site to browse when (if!) you’ve got some time on your hands.

Note that Miller isn’t interested just in words, by the way. His home page (such as it is) reveals someone with an eager, curious mind. For instance, did you know that the plus sign (+) may have begun life as a squashed-up ligature for the Latin word et (meaning “and”)? Neither did I.

(Miller is apparently a high school teacher; I bet his students leave at the end of the year with stray facts spilling from their ears.)