In his fixed address model for short‐term memory Conrad (1965) suggested that order errors in recall arise from fortuitous selection of intrusions from an unordered response availability store. In the present experiment subjects recalled consonant trigrams of high acoustic confusability, each trigram being followed by an interpolated task of acoustically similar or dis‐similar letters. Order errors occurred more often in recall than predicted by the fixed address model. Also, there was no significant tendency for order errors to decrease when the interpolated task was similar to the message to be recalled, although such a decrease is predicted by Conrad's model. It was concluded that the traditional distinction between intrusion and order errors is valid, and that messages for short‐term memory are coded along at least two dimensions, one designating item content, and the other, the order of