"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 05/12/17 (ghost words in dictionary)

I mentioned yesterday I was going to look at what lexicographers get up to. Not in their spare time but the mistakes sometines that happen or deliberate coinages, that sort of thing. Today I thought I would talk about mistakes because one question that we're often asked is, " Do you ever slip up and does the wrong word get into dictionary?" The answer is definitely yes. There are some quite famous examples to prove it. They're called ghost words, these kind of words, and either arrive through accident, so it can be a printer's error or it can be dictionary compiler's error. Or sometime they're deliberate. I'll give you a few examples of the errors. Sometimes the definition is just wonderful. If you look at Samuel Johnson's dictionary, he had "foupe" with the great definition "to drive with a sudden impetuosity". Which is just brilliant. Unfortunately he had misread a long S for an F and it was "soupe". But foupe went in the dictionary for quite a long time until we realised that he'd made a mistake. But possibly most famous lexicoghaphical error of the 20th century, and that was the appearance of the word "dord", which appeared in Webster's New International Dictionary. This is looking back to the 1930s. It was listed as a noun with pronunciation meaning density.In those days, dictionaries were comppiled not on computers but through index cards that would be filed in quite elaborate filing systems. This index card has got misplaced from the abbreviation section to the word section and it was supposed to read "D or d"as an abbreviation for density. But people read it all as one word, it became dord and again that survived in the dictionary for a very, very long time until someone spotted it. So the simple answer is we do mistakes. I/m not sure about any in here but I'm sure I'll come across one at some point.