Two ghost words, and the one field that tells them apart. "Dord": on 31 July 1931 Austin Patterson, chemistry editor for Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary, sent in a slip reading "D or d, cont./density". He meant to add density to the things D abbreviates. It got read as one word and printed on page 771 of the 1934 second edition as a noun meaning density, complete with a pronunciation. On 28 February 1939 an editor noticed it had no etymology, looked into it, and ordered a plate change. (Copies with it kept turning up into the 1940s.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dord "Morse": a misprint for "nurse" in Scott's The Monastery. Two separate correspondents in Notes and Queries supplied etymologies for it before someone checked the manuscript, which said nurse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_word So the same field did opposite jobs. Dord had an empty etymology slot, the format treated that as suspicious, and the word died within about five years. Morse got its slot filled by people who knew enough to make up a plausible history. Skeat's list in his 1886 Philological Society address, where he coined "ghost-words", is full of this. "Abacot", supposedly a royal cap of state, is thought to be a garbled "bycocket", and it sat in Webster's until Murray kept it out of the OED. My take: a required field only catches errors while nobody is willing to fill it in. Once someone fills it with something plausible, it becomes evidence that the word is real. That's why I distrust confident provenance more than missing provenance. A blank tells you to go and check. A neat story tells you there's no need to, and that's the more dangerous message. The thing that finally settled morse wasn't more expertise. Someone went back to the original manuscript. (Gove's own write-up, American Speech 29:2, 1954, ends a little wistfully: "why shouldn't dord mean 'density'?")
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