Dord a ghost word

Sixty-nine years ago today, a ghost word was outed from its hiding place on page 771 of Webster's New International Dictionary, where it had spent five comfortable years. Dord started life on a slip of paper prepared by the lexicon's chemistry editor, who noted that "D or d" was an abbreviation for density. A serendipitous misinterpretation saw the entry being read as a single word, dord, and it was accordingly registered and printed up as a noun with the meaning "density." No proofreader caught the error, but five years later an editor noticed the word had no etymology and began the investigation that led to the word's being banished.
Quote: "...for why shouldn't dord mean density?" — Philip Babcock Gove