When I use a word . . .

Among the almost 300 000 entries in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary a tiny minority (fewer than 400) are distinguished by being completely enclosed in square brackets. These rarities are spurious words, which James Murray originally included in the first edition to correct errors that had been perpetrated in other dictionaries—a sort of one-upmanship on the editor's part. Most of these spurious words arose through misprints or through the errors or misreadings of copyists or translators. For example, exidemic for epidemic, owing to the similarity between x and p in early handwriting.

Some, however, have interesting stories. For instance, dentize, defined as "to cut new teeth," was a misreading of "dentire" in Sylvia (1626), in which Francis Bacon recounted how "They tell a tale of the old Countesse of Desmond, who lived till she was seven-score yeares old, that she did Dentire, twice, or thrice; Casting her old Teeth, and others Coming in their Place." An unlikely tale? Well, the term "third dentition" has been used to describe the eruption of teeth after the loss of all permanent teeth. Ooë (Okajimas Fol Anat Jap 1969;46:243-51) referred to some reported cases (attributed, however, to delayed eruption of supernumerary teeth) and also described a histological structure that he proposed was the precursor of a potential third dentition in man. Still, "third dentition" is more commonly used to describe false teeth.

A well known example in modern times of a spurious scientific word is "dord," defined in Webster's New International Dictionary as "density." The error was explained by the editor of Webster's Third New International, Philip Gove, in an article in American Speech (1954;29:136-8). An expert had sent the publishers a definition slip bearing the words "D or d, cont/density." "Cont," short for continued, meant that this would be one in a series of entries for the abbreviation "D," but it was misinterpreted to mean that the "D or d" should be read as a continuous string. And so "dord" was created. Gove thought it a pity that it was spurious, "for why shouldn't dord mean density?"

Jeff Aronson, clinical pharmacologist, Oxford 

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