This video was made possible by CuriosityStream. Get the CuriosityStream/Nebula bundle deal,
currently on sale for a crazy $1 a month, at CuriosityStream.com/HAI. The dictionary is full of nonsensical words. Words like bumfuzzle. Bumbershoot. Cattywampus. Collywobbles. Dord. Snickersnee. Gardyloo. Taradiddle. Snollygoster. Widdershins. Gubbins. And look at this one: bricks. I mean seriously, what could that mean? Believe it or not, though, they’re all real
words…well, all but one. Can you guess which is a fake? Is it “snollygoster?” Nope. A snollygoster is a “shrewd, unprincipled
person,” from the German schnelle Geister, meaning quick spirits. “Bumbershoot?” Nope. A bumbershoot is a weird nickname for umbrella. Is it bricks? Wrong again, that’s a real word meaning
“something we refuse to make a YouTube video on.” The imposter, it turns out, is dord. Don’t feel bad if you were fooled, though:
so were the editors of the 1934’s Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition. You see, when the smart brain word people
were typing up what all the different squiggles meant, in between Dorcopsis, which is a type
of small kangaroo, and dore, which means having a gold coating, they included a listing for
dord, defined simply as “density.” But the people at Webster’s had a problem:
they were all nerds. But also, dord was not a word. So what happened? Well, Webster’s First Edition, or Word War
I, used to include abbreviations as their own words—for example, km for kilometer
would be its own entry, between kin and kneel—but in 1931, for the Second Edition, Word War
II, the wily wordsmiths decided to move abbreviations to their own section in the back of the book. One fine 1931 day, Webster’s chemistry editor
sat in a black and white room, because color hadn’t been invented yet, and wrote up a
3 by 5 card that read “D or d, cont/density,” meant to communicate that either uppercase
D or lowercase d were both abbreviations for density in chemistry. The “cont” was short for “continuous”
to indicate there would be other things “D” was short for, like the roman numeral 500. But someone mistook “D or d” for a word:
dord, added a pronunciation, slapped it in the dictionary defined as density, and then
went home to do whatever people did before we invented TikTok. And dord remained there until 1939, when an
editor realized it had no etymology, and wrote a card to correct the mistake… a card that
was ignored until 1947, when another editor noticed the mistake, wrote a new card, and
finally, the dastardly dord was done. Dord, though, is not unique. In fact, every dictionary has at least one
mistake: it’s in the M section, after mist. But there are often others: older dictionaries,
especially, were full of errors, as they often got their new words just by reading other
stuff—if they saw a strange new word pop up in a widely published poem or book, they’d
sort out a definition, slap it in, and collect those sweet dictionary dollars without a second
thought. But sometimes, typos in published works would
lead to dictionarians mistaking errors for new words: words like “kime,” defined
by many 19th century dictionaries as a Hindu torture device, but which was actually just
a typo of knife in the Edinburgh Review. The same thing happened with “morse,”
a misspelling of nurse in an edition of Sir Walter Scott’s The Monastery. Plus, several years ago, when the people over
at Wendover Productions named their channel, they accidentally hit W instead of B, and
just look at what that led to. In all of these cases, though, the typos didn’t
end up creating real words—the error was noticed, the word removed, and most people
were too busy doing what people always do—fighting wars, dying of preventable disease, inventing
new ways to fry stuff—to have noticed in the first place. The honor of the only known, accepted word
to be created solely by typo goes to… drumroll please… expediate, which means “to hasten.” It’s a real word, listed in the dictionary,
and used in scientific journals and Senate reports and this tweet by @Blahman24. But, if you’re thinking, “that sure looks
a lot like the word expedite, and it also has the exact same definition,” congratulations,
your brain is one sentence ahead of us. You see, back in 1605, an English politician
named Sir Edwin Sandys wrote expediate instead of expedite in an essay, and the 1623 Oxford
English Dictionary mistook that typo for a new word. This time, though, by the time the etymological
mistake was realized, expediate had become so commonly used that it was considered a
legitimate word. You see, the rules of language are only useful
insofar as they help people communicate, which means that if enough people start saying a
word wrong, it turns out, they aren’t saying it wrong anymore; they’ve actually just
created a new word. Much like a middle-aged white man or the United
States of America, a misspelled word can fail its way into success. And this happens all the time, usually not
because of errors by dictionaries, but errors by people. Take, for example, the word pea. One pea was once a pease, derived from middle
English. If you had more than one slimy green mushball,
you’d have peases. But people kept hearing about eating pease
and thinking it was the plural of pea… a word that didn’t exist. It would be like if you heard about glass
and thought that referred to having more than one gla. But enough people started referring to a single
pease as a pea, that pea became the accepted word. This plural confusion is also how we got “a
cherry,” which was originally “a cherise.” By the way, if you had a cherry allergy, originally,
you would fneeze, until people started misreading the long f as an s, creating sneeze. There are also lots of words that developed
because of confusion about “a” and “an” before words. Notch was actually “otche” but so many
people misunderstood “an otche” as “a notch” that the word changed. Same with newt, which was “an ewt,” and
nickname, which was “an eke name,” eke meaning to lengthen. The opposite process happened as well—orange
was originally “naranj, but “a naranj” got misunderstood as “an orange,” which
also happened to “apron” which started as “naperon.” Plus, the snake we call an adder should actually
be an anadder, but people apparently got tired of sounding like they had a stutter while
trying to communicate what had just poisoned them. In the end, it turns out that little mistakes
can have a big impact on the world. Other times, though big mistakes can have
a little impact on the world: and that’s how we ended up with my new Nebula Original,
“Sam from Wendover Presents: A Very Good Trivia Show, Presented by Sam from Wendover.” All three parts are out now, so you can finally
discover whether Brian from Real Engineering, Jordan Harrod, or Dave from City Beautiful
will be the one to take the most of my money. And once you’re done, you should also check
out CuriosityStream’s thousands of top-quality documentaries and non-fiction TV shows, like
the fantastic Light of the Earth, narrated by David Attenborough. So, make sure to head over to CuriosityStream.com/HAI,
and get the bundle deal on sale for less than $1 a month before the price goes back up very
soon—and in February, watch out for a brand new Wendover Nebula Original.
