Philip Babcock Gove , an editor at Merriam-Webster who became editor-in-chief of `` Webster 's Third New International Dictionary '' , wrote a letter to the journal `` American Speech '' , fifteen years after the error was caught , in which he explained why `` dord '' was included in that dictionary .
Philip Babcock Gove was an editor at Merriam-Webster and became editor-in-chief of Webster 's Third New International Dictionary . Gove wrote a letter to the journal American Speech fifteen years after the error was caught .