There are ordinary mistakes, and then there are mistakes nobody notices until 10,000 copies have already been printed.

The latter deserve a category of their own.

For as long as human beings have been putting words onto paper, other human beings have been discovering ingenious ways to put the wrong words onto paper. Sometimes the damage amounts to little more than embarrassment. Sometimes a typo creates an entirely new word. Sometimes punctuation changes federal tax law. And occasionally someone leaves three letters out of the Bible and accidentally instructs an entire nation to commit adultery.

This is one of the less frequently advertised consequences of the printing revolution. As we have previously seen in our look at Johannes Gutenberg and the development of movable-type printing, the printing press made it possible to reproduce the same text over and over with unprecedented consistency.

Unfortunately, that also meant mistakes could be multiplied with effortless efficiency.

The Wicked Bible: When “Not” Turned Out to Be Fairly Important

If you are responsible for proofreading a Bible, there are probably certain passages that deserve a second look. The Ten Commandments would seem to rank fairly high on that list.

In 1631, London printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas produced an edition of the King James Bible. Barker was no amateur operating a suspicious print shop behind a tavern. He was the King’s Printer and held the royal privilege for printing English Bibles.

Unfortunately, the book contained a small problem in Exodus 20:14.

The commandment that should have read “Thou shalt not commit adultery” appeared instead as “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

Three letters had disappeared, and with them went approximately 3,000 years of official policy.

The error became notorious enough that the edition is now known as the Wicked Bible. Barker and Lucas were fined £300, their printing licenses were revoked, and copies of the offending edition were ordered suppressed. Most were destroyed or corrected, which naturally means that surviving uncorrected copies eventually became valuable collectors’ items.

This illustrates one of history’s more reliable economic principles: if you make a sufficiently spectacular mistake and survive long enough, eventually someone will pay a fortune for it.

The Wicked Bible was especially memorable, but it was by no means the only Bible whose typesetters appeared to be making independent theological contributions.

Apparently the Printers Really Were Out to Get You

Early printed Bibles accumulated enough errors that several editions became known by nicknames based entirely upon what went wrong.

A 1653 Bible printed by John Field, for example, became known as the Unrighteous Bible. In 1 Corinthians 6:9, the verse that should state that “the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God” lost another strategically important “not.” Readers were instead informed that “the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God.”

Between the Wicked Bible and the Unrighteous Bible, seventeenth-century printers had managed to make adultery mandatory and unrighteousness surprisingly advantageous.

Then there was the Printers Bible, published around 1702. Psalm 119:161 should begin, “Princes have persecuted me without a cause.” According to the printed version, however, it was “Printers” who had done the persecuting.

It is difficult to imagine a more convincing example of a Freudian typo approximately two centuries before Freud.

The story gets better. In 1717, Oxford printer John Baskett produced an elaborate Bible whose chapter heading for Luke 20 identified the “Parable of the Vineyard” as the “Parable of the Vinegar.” The resulting Vinegar Bible was beautifully produced but notoriously poorly proofread. Its abundance of typographical mistakes also earned it the nickname “a Baskett full of errors”—a pun based on the printer’s name that was simply too good to waste.

Baskett was hardly alone. Other Bible printers produced mistakes impressive enough to earn entire editions nicknames of their own. Three different editions came to be known as “Murderers Bibles.” One changed “murmurers” in Jude 16 to “murderers.” Another rendered Numbers 35:18 as “the murderer shall surely be put together” instead of “put to death.” In a 1795 edition, Mark 7:27 transformed “Let the children first be filled” into the considerably less reassuring “Let them be killed.” A useful survey of these and other early Bible-printing disasters is available from Brigham Young University’s Religious Studies Center.

Taken together, they are a useful reminder that the ability to mass-produce authoritative texts did not eliminate human error. It merely gave human error a distribution network.

The Comma That Changed Federal Tax Law

Typos in Bibles are embarrassing. Typos in statutes are something attorneys get to bill by the hour.

In 1872, Congress passed a tariff law containing a provision that was intended to admit certain “fruit-plants” free of duty. The important feature here is the hyphen. Congress was referring to plants that produced fruit.

Somewhere between Congress and the final enrolled legislation presented for signature, however, the hyphen underwent a career change and became a comma.

The statute therefore referred to “fruit, plants” rather than “fruit-plants.” Suddenly the language could be read as putting fruit itself on the duty-free list.

This was not merely the sort of punctuation question that causes two English teachers to glare at each other across the faculty lounge. Importers had money riding on the answer.

The Treasury Department eventually treated imported fruit as duty-free under the enacted language, resulting in substantial refunds. Later accounts have sometimes described this as the famous “million-dollar comma” or claimed that the government lost $2 million or more.

The contemporary government record is less dramatic, although still impressive. An 1894 Treasury Department letter explained that the error resulted in refunds totaling “about a half million dollars.” Congress eventually passed legislation correcting the punctuation.

Half a million dollars in the 1870s was not exactly pocket change. It was an expensive lesson in why the person asking, “Do we really need someone to proofread the enrolled bill?” should not immediately be escorted from the room.

Dord: The Word That Did Not Exist Until the Dictionary Said It Did

Of all publications, a dictionary seems like the worst place for a nonexistent word to sneak past the editors. A dictionary is, after all, the book we consult specifically to determine whether words exist.

Nevertheless, in 1934, the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary introduced English-speaking readers to the word “dord.”

It supposedly meant “density.”

There was just one problem. Nobody had ever used it.

The story began with a filing slip prepared by chemistry editor Austin M. Patterson. The notation was intended to show that capital “D” or lowercase “d” could serve as an abbreviation for density. Because dictionary editors spaced letters apart when preparing material for typesetting, someone apparently interpreted “D or d” as the letters D-O-R-D awaiting assembly.

The imaginary word moved through the editorial process. It received a pronunciation. It acquired a definition. It passed readers, an etymologist, and proofreaders. Eventually, “dord” took its place among the legitimate inhabitants of the English language despite having no qualifications for residency whatsoever.

The error was finally discovered on February 28, 1939, when an editor investigating the suspicious entry realized that “dord” had no legitimate business being there and marked it as a “ghost word”—the lexicographical term for a word that comes into existence through an error rather than actual usage. As History of Sorts recounts, the discovery did not produce an especially urgent exorcism. Although the mistake was identified in 1939, “dord” remained in the dictionary until 1947, giving a word that had never really existed an impressively long afterlife.

That delay somehow makes the story better. “Dord” did not merely infiltrate the dictionary; after being exposed as an impostor, it was permitted to hang around for another eight years.

Lexicographers call accidental entries like this “ghost words.” If you enjoy stories about the strange people and processes behind dictionaries, this pairs nicely with our look at the extraordinary history of the Oxford English Dictionary and Dr. William Chester Minor.

Dewey Defeats Truman: When the Headline Arrived Before the Election Result

Not every famous editorial disaster involves a misspelled word. Sometimes every word is spelled perfectly and the entire sentence is still wrong.

On November 3, 1948, the Chicago Daily Tribune published what may be the most famous incorrect newspaper headline in American history:

“DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.”

Thomas E. Dewey had not defeated Harry Truman. Harry Truman had won reelection.

The mistake was not completely irrational. Many political observers expected Dewey to win, and early polling had reinforced that expectation. A printers’ strike also forced the Tribune to operate under unusually early production deadlines. According to a Library of Congress account, the newspaper had to commit to its edition hours earlier than usual.

The Tribune committed all right.

Truman subsequently encountered a copy of the newspaper and happily posed holding it for photographers. The resulting photograph became one of the most recognizable images in American political history.

The incident possesses almost perfect comic timing. Newspapers ordinarily record history after it happens. The Tribune decided to streamline the process by recording history in advance and asking history to please cooperate.

History declined.

For another example of a newspaper eventually having to admit that something had gone spectacularly wrong, see our story about the New York Times correction that was 49 years late. In fairness to the Tribune, at least it figured out its error before the Apollo program.

The Newspaper That Misspelled “Misspelled” in a Correction About Misspellings

Anyone who works with words professionally learns an uncomfortable truth: the likelihood of making a typo increases dramatically whenever you are writing about someone else’s typo.

The Guardian has enjoyed—or endured—a particularly colorful history in this department. Its reputation for typographical errors became so familiar that the satirical magazine Private Eye famously nicknamed it the “Grauniad.”

In 2021, marking its 200th anniversary, the newspaper revisited some of its more memorable errors.

Among them were references to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Screw, a medical treatment for “irritable bowl syndrome,” and the Scottish band Frightened Rabbit becoming “Frightened Rabbi.” The newspaper once transformed Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain into Sketches of Pain, which admittedly sounds like an entirely plausible jazz album.

But the masterpiece arrived in 2007, when the corrections column acknowledged that it had misspelled the word “misspelled” twice.

There comes a point at which the universe is no longer permitting an error. It is editing collaboratively.

The Pasta Bible and the Most Unfortunate Ingredient Substitution Possible

By 2010, publishing had benefited from computers, spell-checking, professional copy editors, sophisticated page-layout software, and centuries of accumulated experience.

None of these things helped The Pasta Bible.

Penguin Australia published the cookbook with a recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto. The recipe was supposed to instruct readers to season the dish with “salt and freshly ground black pepper.”

The printed edition substituted one word.

It called for “freshly ground black people.”

This is not the sort of substitution one can quietly repair with a sticker.

According to The Guardian’s contemporary report, Penguin arranged to destroy approximately 7,000 copies remaining in its warehouse, at a reported cost of A$20,000. Copies that had already reached stores were not recalled; the publisher said doing so would be “extremely hard.” The surviving copies therefore acquired something most cookbooks never achieve: collectible value.

The publisher described the incident as a “silly mistake,” which was technically accurate in much the same way that the Titanic encountered a “navigation issue.”

There is also something reassuring about this example. The error did not occur in 1631, when printers manually arranged individual pieces of metal type under candlelight. It occurred in 2010.

Technology changes. Human beings remain stubbornly committed to the traditions.

Nor are books the only things capable of carrying a typo into the world by the millions. Australia released its redesigned $50 banknote into circulation in October 2018; by the time the mistake was publicly discovered in May 2019, 46 million notes had been printed with “responsibility” misspelled as “responsibilty” in the microscopic text.

Chile had already demonstrated that coins were equally capable of embarrassing their creators: 50-peso coins dated 2008 identified the country as the “Republica de Chiie”, with a second “i” where the “l” should have been. The error came to public attention in 2009. Apparently, if you are going to misspell something, putting it on money is an excellent way to ensure that people will eventually examine your work very, very closely.

How Did These Famous Typos Survive Proofreading?

Looking backward, it can seem astonishing that anyone missed these mistakes. How could a proofreader overlook a commandment endorsing adultery? How could multiple dictionary editors fail to notice that “dord” had no etymology, no citations, and no evidence that anyone had ever said it?

The uncomfortable answer is that proofreading is much harder than it looks.

Readers tend to see what they expect to see. If you already know that the sentence says “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” your brain is very good at supplying the missing word without bothering to tell you. Familiar language can therefore be harder to proofread than unfamiliar language because the mind is constantly correcting the page before conscious attention catches up.

Production systems create additional opportunities for trouble. A manuscript may pass through writers, editors, compositors, proofreaders, printers, and layout staff. Each person assumes someone else has checked something. Corrections can introduce new errors. Deadlines encourage people to approve material they would examine more carefully if a printing press were not sitting downstairs consuming money.

And authority can make the problem worse. If something appears in a Bible, statute, dictionary, textbook, or major newspaper, readers naturally assume that someone somewhere must have checked it.

Usually someone did.

That is what makes these stories interesting.

The Most Dangerous Words in Publishing: “It’s Probably Fine”

The history of editorial mistakes is ultimately a history of misplaced confidence. Barker and Lucas produced an authoritative Bible. Congressional clerks prepared an authoritative statute. Webster published an authoritative dictionary. The Chicago Daily Tribune published an authoritative election result.

Each one transformed a mistake into something that looked official simply by putting it into print.

That ability of publication to confer credibility is one reason errors can survive long after their origin has been forgotten. Misquotations work the same way. Once an incorrect quotation appears often enough in respectable-looking places, repetition begins impersonating evidence. We have encountered that phenomenon repeatedly in our collection of famous quotations that almost everyone gets wrong.

The difference is that most misquotations develop gradually. The mistakes here arrived fully formed, neatly typeset, bound, distributed, and in some cases backed by the prestige of church, government, dictionary publisher, or newspaper.

Some errors were expensive. Some were embarrassing. Some became valuable precisely because they were wrong. One created a word. One changed tariff policy. One elected the wrong president several hours early.

And one removed the word “not” from the commandment against adultery.

Proofread carefully.

Somewhere, history is waiting for you to miss something.

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