Not dad, dude or dud－the word is dord, and it's worth saving

Population dord is a major consideration for city planners in determining how many primary schools are needed in an area. If the dord is extreme, far more classrooms will be needed.

What's that? You don't know what dord means? Well, look it up in the dictionary.

Oh wait, it's no longer listed.

I learned about the word dord from a daily vocabulary email I get from Merriam-Webster, the publisher of one of the premier United States English dictionaries.

Dord, it turns out, is not a word, but in 1934 it had passed unnoticed by editors, etymologists and proofreaders and was accidentally listed in the second edition of the 7.7 kilo Webster's New International Dictionary.

One of the editors had submitted information for an entry concerning the abbreviation "D or d" used in chemistry and physics for "density". Somehow, that note became the 1934 dictionary entry: Dord, noun. Physics & Chem. Density.

In 1934, Webster's New International was the undisputed sovereign of US English dictionaries, yet the mistake went unnoticed until 1939. Even then, the "ghost word", as Merriam-Webster calls it, continued to lurk in the shadows. It wasn't removed from the dictionary until the 1947 edition.

I can't tell you how often it comes up in the China Daily newsroom that one or another editor will ask "Is such and such really a word?" and the question gets answered by someone checking whether it stands in the dictionary. And, by the way, such and such is listed in the dictionary I use at home, Merriam-Webster's Collegiate.

For editors, whichever dictionary is chosen as the "house dictionary", the standard for the publication, wields that boundless power exercised by the ancient Greek gods or the wizards in European fairytales. You might occasionally question the wisdom of one of its decrees, but to willfully ignore it could summon the editorial equivalent of the wrath of a fairytale sorceress turning you into a frog－in our case, say, a jackass.

That authority is understandable, considering how reliable they are. It's exceedingly rare that a dictionary includes a non-word among its listings. I know of only one other example.

After the New Oxford American Dictionary published its second edition in 2005, word got around that it included a made-up entry in the listings for the letter E.

Many US editors began searching the listings to identify the pretender. After all, the bragging rights that would come with the discovery were considerable. At length, the Holy Grail was found.

Apparently, one of the NOAD's editors invented the word "esquivalience", which was given the tongue-in-cheek definition "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities".

The word was added to protect the NOAD's copyright. Any dictionary listing esquivalience would have obviously filched it from the NOAD, thus shirking the responsibility of doing its own work, and a few online dictionaries did just that.

"Its inherent fakeitude is fairly obvious", said Erin McKean, NOAD's chief editor, when she confirmed the ruse.

Kudos to McKean, by the way, for coining the non-word word－at least according to my dictionary－fakeitude.

Getting back to dord, considering that it was able to hold its own in such a heavyweight US English dictionary for 13 years, doesn't it deserve another chance?

Maybe it would be asking too much to have it listed under its original definition. But for a word of such unique heritage, that might be too confining. Why not expand its powers to that of a catchall you can use to mean anything when the actual word escapes you?

After all, it's much more deserving than thingamajig.

Contact the writer at lydon@chinadaily.com.cn