The dictionary that invented a word was Merriam-Webster's. Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, published in 1934, printed "dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density." between a genus of small kangaroos and doré. No such word existed: a chemistry editor's slip reading "D or d", the capital and small letter that stand for density, had been read as one word (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-a). Merriam-Webster calls dord its only ghost word.
This guide is published by EdCitation and rests on sources read on 3 October 2026: Merriam-Webster's account of dord and the editors' slips it reproduces, the Oxford English Dictionary's entries and its volumes of 1888, 1909 and 1933, Walter Skeat's 1886 address that named ghost words, and The New Yorker's 2005 report on a word planted on purpose. Merriam-Webster's and the OED's own sites turned us away with bot checks, so their pages were read in archived copies. Where a story could not be traced to a source we read, we say it is unconfirmed.
Nothing in EdCitation writes a word of anyone's work, and we are proud of that: it looks sources up and checks finished papers, so every sentence you hand in is yours. Mechanics QA goes over a finished file rule by rule, including the language slips that get past a spell-checker, and the free Find sources turns up the research behind a word's story.
What is dord, and how did it get into the dictionary?
Dord is a non-word that Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition, defined as density from 1934 until a plate change in 1947. Merriam-Webster, which calls the book W2, says it took 250 editors and consultants, weighed 17 pounds and was the largest book ever mass-produced (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-a).
How "D or d" became one word
The slip behind the entry is stamped "Patterson" and 7-31-31. Merriam-Webster's video dates it 31 July 1931, and its article names Austin M. Patterson as the chemistry editor (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-a, n.d.-c). The slip reads "D or d, cont." with "density" below: a note that the capital and the small d both stand for density, meant for the list of abbreviations.
Headwords on slips were typed with a space between every letter, to leave room for stress and syllable marks, so "D or d" looked like a four-letter word with one space missing. Whoever handled the slip underlined all four letters with the wavy line for bold type, making a headword. It was set in lower case as a common noun, the pronunciation editor added a pronunciation, and it got past the etymologist and the proofreader. The entry had no etymology and no example, and the files held none either.
Who caught it, and why it lasted until 1947
A second slip, also reproduced by Merriam-Webster, copies out the entry, calls it a ghost word in red ink, and explains that "Patterson's slip should have gone to abbreviations". It is stamped 28 February 1939 and marked imperative and urgent. Both slips carry a stamp for a plate change in December 1940, yet a third slip, initialled J.P.B., reports that the deleted entry "still appears in books that we have" and asks for special attention. It is stamped as changed in 1947. Merriam-Webster says only that "for some reason" the correction waited that long.
Philip B. Gove's "The History of 'Dord'" appeared in American Speech in 1954; its host blocked us with a bot check, so nothing here rests on it.
What is a ghost word?
A ghost word is a word that exists only through error, never through use. Merriam-Webster defines it as "a word form never in established usage" (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-b). The OED names the usual causes: a misprint, a miscopied manuscript, or a wrong definition in a dictionary (Oxford University Press, n.d.-c). Both date the term to 1887.
Walter Skeat named them in 1886
The term comes from Walter W. Skeat's address as president of the Philological Society on 21 May 1886, printed in its Transactions in 1887 (Skeat, 1887). Skeat proposed to "call them 'ghost-words'" because, "Like ghosts, we may seem to see them", and kept the name for forms with no meaning at all. A real word in the wrong place did not count: a newspaper that turned friends shooting pheasants into "fiends shooting peasants" misused real words, and Skeat gave even that only "according to the story".
His two modern examples were startling. Kimes, in Sydney Smith's 1808 review in the Edinburgh Review, was a misprint for knives, which a critic, John Styles, took for a real instrument of torture; Smith mocked him for it in 1809. The verb morse stood for nurse in most editions of Walter Scott's The Monastery, and two readers of Notes and Queries explained it from Latin before the manuscript settled it. Skeat's moral: a plausible ghost word "will be greedily accepted and even defended" (Skeat, 1887, p. 354).
Which ghost words got into dictionaries?
Most came from old books, through dictionaries that copied one another. The OED's editors hunted them, and its 1933 Supplement printed a List of Spurious Words: the more important ones, "arising chiefly from misprints or misreadings", then an alphabet of minor forms from Abacot to Zimme (Craigie & Onions, 1933).
| Word | Where it appeared | What went wrong | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| dord | Webster's New International Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1934 | "D or d" for density read as one word; removed 1947 | Merriam-Webster (n.d.-a) |
| abacot | Phillips, Bailey, Webster and other dictionaries | A misprint of bycocket in Hall's chronicle, 1548 | Murray (1888) |
| phantomnation | Worcester, 1860; Webster, 1864 | Pope's "Phantome-nations" written as one word | Craigie and Onions (1933) |
| geotic | Johnson, 1755; Webster, 1864 | An error for goetic | Craigie and Onions (1933) |
| kimes | Edinburgh Review, 1808 | A misprint for knives | Skeat (1887) |
| morse (verb) | Most editions of Scott's The Monastery | A misreading of nurse | Skeat (1887) |
| theatricals, "stage properties" | An OED part ready in 1912 | A ghost meaning from a misread Dickens letter | Gold (2020) |
| esquivalience | New Oxford American Dictionary, 2001 | Planted on purpose as a copyright trap | Alford (2005) |
| Lillian Virginia Mountweazel | New Columbia Encyclopedia, 1975 | An invented person, planted | Alford (2005) |
| bondmaid | Missing from the OED, 1888 | A real word left out until 1933 | Craigie and Onions (1933) |
Abacot: one misprint, copied for three centuries
Webster's dictionary, as Skeat quoted it, defined it as "the cap of state formerly used by English kings, wrought into the figure of two crowns". James Murray, the OED's editor, refused it in the Athenaeum of 4 February 1882 (Skeat, 1887), and the OED's volume of 1888 traced it. Bycocket, a peaked cap, was apparently misprinted in Hall's chronicle of 1548, copied by Grafton, shortened by Holinshed and "improved" to abacot by Abraham Fleming in 1587. Spelman, Phillips, Bailey, Ash and Todd then handed it to nineteenth-century dictionaries, some with a picture (Murray, 1888).
Skeat complained that Ogilvie's Imperial Dictionary spent 27 lines and a small picture on abacot only to report why Murray had rejected it. The OED still has an entry for abacot, its earliest evidence Hall's chronicle and its source bycocket (Oxford University Press, n.d.-a); the definition is behind a subscription, and we did not read it.
Phantomnation: Pope's hyphen dropped
Pope's Odyssey of 1725 has "The Phantome-nations of the dead". In 1820 Jodrell, who wrote compounds as one word, entered phantomnation as "a multitude of spectres". Worcester's dictionary of 1860 took it as "illusion", credited to Pope, and Webster's of 1864 as "appearance as of a phantom; illusion" (Craigie & Onions, 1933). The OED's 1909 volume sends readers from phantomnation, "error for phantom nation", to its list (Murray, 1909).
Johnson's geotic and a builder's banket
The list blames Johnson's Dictionary of 1755 for geotic, "belonging to the earth; terrestrial", an error for goetic; Bailey's dictionary of 1727 had glossed geotick as a sort of magic. Webster's of 1864 repeated the entry. The list also traces banket, a bricklayer's piece of wood, to an 1846 error for banker, which passed into Webster's of 1864 and the Century Dictionary of 1889 (Craigie & Onions, 1933). Johnson's own story is in Samuel Johnson's dictionary, and Webster's in Noah Webster and American spelling.
Ghost meanings in real words
A real word can carry a ghost sense. Gold (2020) traces two meanings of the plural theatricals, "stage properties" in an OED part ready for the printer in March 1912 and "theater memorabilia" in Webster's Third of 1961, to misreadings of a letter Charles Dickens wrote on 19 June 1855, and says neither had been corrected in any edition or printing. We read only the abstract, as the full text was behind a bot check.
Do dictionaries put fake words in on purpose?
Some have, as a copyright trap: a fake entry that exposes a copier. Asked whether an editor could slip a made-up word in, Merriam-Webster answers "emphatically no" (Merriam-Webster, n.d.-a). Oxford's New Oxford American Dictionary did it, and an encyclopedia did it before.
Esquivalience
In 2005 word leaked that the dictionary's second edition held a made-up word beginning with e. Alford (2005) reports that an investigator cut its 3,128 e entries down to six suspects and sent them to nine authorities on words; seven picked esquivalience, defined as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities", with an invented etymology from the French esquiver. Erin McKean, editor in chief of the second edition, confirmed it. It had gone into the first edition in 2001 to protect the copyright of the electronic version, and the editor Christine Lindberg coined it. "We were trying to make a word that could not arise in nature," McKean said.
It had already reached Dictionary.com, which cited another dictionary for it; searched there on 3 October 2026, esquivalience brought up equivalence instead (Dictionary.com, n.d.).
Lillian Virginia Mountweazel
Page 1,850 of the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia gives Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer of rural American mailboxes, born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942 and killed at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine. She never existed. Richard Steins, one of the volume's editors, told Alford (2005) that a fake entry was "an old tradition in encyclopedias" for catching copiers, and Alford called the six suspect words Mountweazels.
Can a dictionary lose a real word?
Yes: the OED left out bondmaid, a slave girl, in 1888. Its volume for A and B runs from bondly straight to bondman (Murray, 1888), though the word goes back to Tyndale's New Testament of 1526. It first appeared in the 1933 Supplement (Craigie & Onions, 1933), which today's entry lists as its earliest version (Oxford University Press, n.d.-b).
Why it was missed is less certain. The story that its slips fell behind other books is credited to Simon Winchester's history of the OED, which we could not read, so treat it as unconfirmed. How the OED's slips were gathered is in how the OED was made by volunteer readers.
Why do ghost words matter when you cite a source?
In our view a ghost word and a ghost reference are made the same way: someone copies an authority instead of going back to the source. Skeat (1887) said a word once coined is "repeated by one authority after another", and abacot was copied for three centuries. A reference copied from another paper's list carries its errors the same way, and an AI tool can produce one nobody published (why AI tools invent references). Printers' slips of other kinds are in famous misprints in history, and real words, however long, in the longest words and other records.
Check a strange word, or a reference, before you use it
- Look for use, not just an entry. Dord had no etymology, no example of use and nothing in the files: an entry with nothing behind it deserves a second look.
- Trace it to its first printing. The OED traced abacot back through each dictionary to Hall's chronicle.
- Read the original, not a copy. Scott's manuscript settled morse: it reads nurse. Quote the edition or the paper itself.
- Build the reference from the record. EdCitation's free Cite a source takes a DOI, a title, a PubMed ID, an ISBN or a web address and returns the entry in any of six styles (APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver), with the source screened for retraction.
- Check the whole list. Paste it into Verify references, free: every entry comes back verified, "check this" or not found, retracted papers carry a flag, and an entry that could not be checked says so instead of passing as not found. How to check a reference is real gives the steps by hand.
How does EdCitation help with the last read of a paper?
For that last pass we think EdCitation is the strongest choice: its checks run against rules and records, and none of them rewrites a sentence. Dord shows why a final pass by rule matters, since it got past a pronunciation editor, an etymologist and a proofreader.
Mechanics QA, by rule
Upload the finished paper, as a Word document or a PDF, to Mechanics QA, and it reads the file's own properties rule by rule. Formatting is held to the APA 7 student paper: font and size, spacing, margins, the title page, headings and the reference list. It finds what should not reach a marker (comments, tracked changes, placeholders, template text), sets every citation against the list, checks every reference against the publisher's record, and catches figures that disagree between sections, along with language slips a spell-checker misses. Your paper is never read by a model. Findings come as must fix or fix and check, each marked in place with its fix. Whether a dictionary word is a ghost is still yours to research. A free account gives three checks a month, and Pro, at $8 a month, removes the limit (pricing).
Find sources, run once
No account is needed for Find sources, which is free and covers about 300 million published works, searched by subject or by a claim you need to back up, with filters for the kind of source, the years and open access. On 3 October 2026 we searched "ghost words dictionary": it reported 29,977 results from OpenAlex. First came Pär Larson's 2010 paper on ghost words and new discoveries in the TLIO Old Italian dictionary, then Gold's 2020 article on ghost meanings, cited above. The first ten also held a physics paper on ghost D-branes, and two dictionaries filed under a medical entomology venue and a paramedicine journal: read each record before you trust it.
Quick questions
Is dord a real word?
No. Dord is a ghost word: Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition (1934) printed it for density after misreading "D or d", and Merriam-Webster removed it in 1947.
What is a ghost word?
A word that exists only through error, such as a misprint, a misread manuscript or a wrong dictionary entry. Walter Skeat named them in 1886, and Merriam-Webster and the OED date the term to 1887.
Is esquivalience a real word?
No. The New Oxford American Dictionary invented it in 2001 as a copyright trap, defined as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities", and its editor confirmed the fake in 2005.
What is a Mountweazel?
A fake entry planted to catch copiers, as The New Yorker used the name in 2005, after Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, an invented photographer in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia.
Which EdCitation tool checks a finished paper for slips?
Mechanics QA, part of Pro ($8 a month); a free account allows three checks a month. It reads the file by rule for formatting, leftovers, citations, numbers and language, including what a spell-checker misses, and leaves every correction to you.
References
- Alford, H. (2005, August 29). Not a word. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/08/29/not-a-word
- Craigie, W. A., & Onions, C. T. (Eds.). (1933). A new English dictionary on historical principles: Introduction, supplement, and bibliography. Clarendon Press. https://archive.org/details/newenglishdictio00murruoft
- Dictionary.com. (n.d.). Esquivalience [Search]. Retrieved October 3, 2026, from https://www.dictionary.com/browse/esquivalience
- Gold, D. L. (2020). Ghost meanings created by dictionaries: The case of Dickens's use of the word theatricals. Dickens Quarterly, 37(3), 238–248. https://doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2020.0032
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-a). 'Dord': How a non-word made it into the dictionary. Wordplay. https://web.archive.org/web/20260830061246/https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/dord-a-ghost-word
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-b). Ghost word. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. https://web.archive.org/web/20260907232424/https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ghost%20word
- Merriam-Webster. (n.d.-c). How a ghost word appeared in the dictionary [Video]. Ask the Editor. https://web.archive.org/web/20260318064831/https://www.merriam-webster.com/video/ghost-word
- Murray, J. A. H. (Ed.). (1888). A new English dictionary on historical principles (Vol. 1, A and B). Clarendon Press. https://archive.org/details/oed01arch
- Murray, J. A. H. (Ed.). (1909). A new English dictionary on historical principles (Vol. 7, O and P). Clarendon Press. https://archive.org/details/newenglishdic07murruoft
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-a). Abacot, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. https://web.archive.org/web/20240708210147/https://www.oed.com/dictionary/abacot_n
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-b). Bondmaid, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. https://web.archive.org/web/20250503091409/https://www.oed.com/dictionary/bondmaid_n
- Oxford University Press. (n.d.-c). Ghost word, n. In Oxford English Dictionary. https://web.archive.org/web/20240906030802/https://www.oed.com/dictionary/ghost-word_n
- Skeat, W. W. (1887). Fourteenth address of the President, to the Philological Society, delivered at the anniversary meeting, Friday, 21st May, 1886. Transactions of the Philological Society, 20(1), 343–393. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-968x.1887.tb00113.x