I suppose, have crept in either in the course of transcription or of printing.  As specimens I mention two, because they have unfortunately perverted ordinary usage.  The two words Coco and Cocoa—­the former a Portuguese word[12], naming the coco-nut, the fruit of a palm-tree; the latter a latinized form of Cacao, the Aztec name of a Central American shrub, whence we have cocoa and chocolate—­were always distinguished down to Johnson’s time, and were in fact distinguished by Johnson himself in his own writings.  His account of these in the Dictionary is quoted from Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary and Hill’s Materia Medica, in which the former is spelt coco and the latter cacao and cocoa.  But in Johnson’s Dictionary the two words are by some accident run together under the heading cocoa, with the disastrous result that modern vulgar usage mixes the two up, spells the coco-nut, ‘cocoa-’ as if it were co-co-a, and on the other hand pronounces cocoa, the cacao-bean and the beverage, as if it were coco.  The word dispatch, from It. dispaccio, had been in English use for some 250 years when Johnson’s Dictionary appeared, and had been correctly spelt by everybody (that is by everybody but the illiterate) with dis-.  This was Johnson’s own spelling both before and after he published the dictionary, as may be seen in his Letters edited by Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill[13].  It was also the spelling of all the writers whom Johnson quoted.  But by some inexplicable error, the word got into the dictionary as despatch, and this spelling was even substituted in most of the quotations.  I have not found that a single writer followed this erroneous spelling in the eighteenth century:  Nelson, Wellesley, Wellington, and all our commanders and diplomatists wrote Dispatches; but since about 1820, the filtering down of the influence of Johnson’s Dictionary has caused this erroneous spelling despatch to become generally known and to be looked upon as authoritative; so that at the present time about half our newspapers give the erroneous form, to which, more larmentably, the Post Office, after long retaining the correct official tradition, recently capitulated.

But despite small blemishes[14], the dictionary was a marvellous piece of work to accomplish in eight and a half years; and it is quite certain that, if all the quotations had had to be verified and furnished with exact references, a much longer time, or the employment of much more collaboration, would have been required.  With much antecedent preparation, with much skilled co-operation, and with strenuous effort, it took more than nine years to produce the first three letters of the alphabet of the Oxford New English Dictionary.