The Liar's Dictionary

David rearranged the pencils and notepads on his desk as he went on. The speech felt rehearsed, thesis-like. He explained that factually incorrect words can crop up in any work of reference. While they do undermine any overall sense of a dictionary’s objective authority, these entries will not necessarily be considered ‘fiction’, however. It was crucial to consider, he said, whether there was any intention to disseminate untruths. The cause for non-facts appearing in dictionaries could be split most simply between those mistakes that occurred as a result of extra-lexical concerns and those that occurred through editorial misunderstandings. David was at pains to point out how other, rival dictionaries botched this: for example, early in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary, all of the drafted definitions that began with the letters Pa written up on slips, ready to be edited, were accidentally used for kindling. This error was blamed on an inattentive housemaid. Moreover, only after the first edition of the OED appeared in print was it discovered that a fugitive bondmaid

(n.) entry had been completely left out from the proofs due to misfiling. This kind of unfortunate occurrence was not limited to dictionaries and encyclopaedias, of course. In an interview, the creator of the popular London A–Z Street Atlas described how she momentarily lost possession of 23,000 index cards out of a window thanks to a sudden gust of wind. Many of those hand-completed cards flew onto the top of a bus as it sped down Holborn High Street. This explains the absence of the entry for Trafalgar Square in the first edition. I had no idea whether this anecdote was true or not. I never checked, but David made a very compelling narrator for forgivable editors’ oversights. He could write a dictionary of failures, I thought.

David continued: unfortunate coincidences and misjudgements of this kind could cause an incomplete dictionary but certainly not a deliberately incorrect one – there is no evidence of malicious intent in these instances that contributed to a wrong dictionary designed to mislead the user. Reader. Chance-upon-er. Plain errors of definition as well as mistakes could just sneak into a dictionary or encyclopaedia, and such blunders were contributing factors to the unwitting summoning of so-called ghost words. David spoke about ghost words for some time, grabbing a text from his shelves and quoting directly from it: ‘Yes, ghost words

– “words which have no real existence” dum de dum, blah de blah –’ he thumbed through the paragraph – ‘“being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imaginations of ignorant or blundering editors.”’

I had no idea what he was quoting.

Such fruits of ‘perfervid imagination’ were represented by the ghost word dord that ‘famously’ appeared in five consecutive editions of Webster’s New International Dictionary.

In 1931, Webster’s chemistry editor submitted a slip that read ‘D or d, cont./density’, intending to indicate that the letter D in upper-or lowercase could stand as an abbreviation for the value of a density in scientific equations. Miscommunication between different editorial bodies within the publishing process meant that Webster’s typesetters received the editor’s slip and assumed that Dord was a headword, defined as ‘density’, rather than an illustration of upper-or lowercase – it was only when dord

’s lack of etymology was noted in 1939 that the entry was questioned and eventually expunged.

Dense dense dense. God knows how many people must have used dord in that time. I know I used it at least four times every week, dorddawdledoodling my way through the day.

Many lexicographers and encyclopaedists drew upon their predecessors in a sleight of standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants (unacknowledged or scandalised as those giants might be by the presumption), and we should count ourselves lucky that dord hadn’t worked its way into Swansby’s pages.

At this point in his lecture, David Swansby gave a nervous cough. He went on, avoiding my gaze.

Some dictionaries deliberately constructed and disseminated fictions in order to protect their contents, whereby the violating act of inserting a fictional entry enabled that entry to become an anti-violation device. Think of it this way, David said: if (if!) you were compiling a dictionary, it would be very easy to purloin another person’s work and pass it off as your own since words are words are words, etc., etc. But if they made up a word and put it in their text and then saw that it had bobbed up in your pages, they’d know you copied their stuff.