For decades, dictionary editors and compilers have often included entirely fictitious entries as traps intended to catch anyone seeking to copy and reprint the text as their own – if a faked entry were ever to appear in another dictionary, the original editors would know immediately that their work had been plagiarized. Such terms are variously known as ghost words, nihilartikels (literally ‘nothing-articles’) or Mountweazels, named after the fictitious Lilian Virginia Mountweazel whose entirely fabricated life story was included in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Although some of the earliest of these ghost words were rooted in genuine lexicographical mistakes (like DORD and PHANTOMNATION), more recently they are the deliberate creations of editors and are included just as jokes or for publicity purposes. Nevertheless, despite their inaccuracy, some of these entries end up taking on a life of their own after publication and can remain in print for several years.
The fictitious word apopudobalia was included in the first volume of the 1980 edition of the Realencyclopädie, a renowned German encyclopaedia of classical antiquity. In the book, apopudobalia was defined as an Ancient Greek sport similar to and considered a precursor of modern football, which was hugely popular amongst Roman legions and consequently spread throughout Europe as the empire expanded until it reached Britain, where ‘the game enjoyed a revival in the nineteenth century’. The entire article, which even includes fake references to both ancient and modern scholarly texts, was a hoax.
The word dord was defined as meaning ‘density’ when it was included in the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1934. In fact, no such term has ever existed but it was not until five years after the book went to print that the mistake was noticed. According to the story, the entry was mistakenly created in July 1931 when a consultant specializing in chemistry terms sent a note to the editors of the dictionary reading ‘D or d, cont./density’. The note was intended to mean that the word ‘density’ should be included in a list of words for which the letter D (or lower case d) can be an abbreviation, but instead ‘D or d’ was misread as a single word and entered into the text. A part of speech and even a recommended pronunciation were both subsequently added to the entry and the word went to print. It was not removed until 1947.
When the second edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary was published in May 2005, it was announced that alongside the addition of 3,000 new words this latest edition also featured a fake entry somewhere under the letter E. As reported in the New Yorker, the American journalist Henry Alford eventually narrowed this potential bogus entry down to a shortlist of six possibilities, and after consulting with several language experts eventually discovered the fictitious word esquivalience. Defined as ‘the wilful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities’ or ‘the shirking of duties’, the word was said to have been coined in the nineteenth century from the (genuine) French verb esquiver, meaning ‘to dodge’, but in fact it had simply been concocted by one of the dictionary’s editors.
Foupe was erroneously included in Samuel Johnson’s landmark Dictionary of the English Language in 1755, in which it was defined as a verb meaning to ‘drive with a sudden impetuosity’. Citing a quotation from an early seventeenth-century work by the English historian William Camden, both Johnson’s definition and citation were correct, but his spelling of the word was not – he had misread the so-called long S (?) often used in texts dating from the time as a lower-case F (f ), and so Camden’s original quotation should have read, ‘To soupe their words out of the throat with fat and full spirits.’ The error was not corrected until the early nineteenth century, but foupe is still listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘an error for soupe’.
In one of the most inventive uses of fake words, in 2011 Google used the fake search term hiybbprqag in an online sting operation against Microsoft and its rival search engine, Bing. As widely reported in the press at the time, Google had earlier become suspicious that Bing had been copying their search results after noticing similarities between the topmost results on both sites, despite inconsistencies in users’ spelling. In one example, users who searched for ‘torsoraphy’ via Google had their spelling corrected to tarsorrhaphy (a surgical procedure carried out on the eyelids) before being directed to a list of relevant websites, whilst searching for the same misspelling via Bing did not correct the error, but still managed to produce the same results. In an attempt to uncover what was happening, Google created a list of around one hundred fake words, and linked each one to a different website – searching for hiybbprqag brought up a seating chart for a Los Angeles theatre. When it was discovered that searching for the same fictitious word brought up the same result in Bing, Google were able to prove that Microsoft had indeed been copying their results.
A 1943 edition of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary featured the word jungftak, defined as a ‘Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side’, so that the pair had to join together in order to fly. Unsurprisingly, both the creature and its name were entirely fictitious, but it was not until the 1980s that the hoax was uncovered and finally acknowledged by the dictionary’s editorial staff.
Phantomnation was defined as meaning a ‘multitude of spectres’ in the Philology of the English Language, an 1820 work by the English classicist Richard Paul Jodrell. Jodrell took the word from an eighteenth-century translation of Homer’s Odyssey by Alexander Pope, but in doing so removed a hyphen from Pope’s original quotation describing ‘the Phantome-nations of the dead’. As such, Jodrell accidentally created his own ghost word, which despite its inaccuracy went on to be adopted into a handful of other dictionaries, including Webster’s 1864 American Dictionary of the English Language, which defined it as an ‘appearance as of a phantom’. The Oxford English Dictionary, however, correctly refers to it as ‘a misinterpretation’ of Pope’s term.
The steinlaus, or ‘stone louse’, was a fictitious creature invented by the German humorist and filmmaker Loriot for a 1976 comedy sketch parodying nature documentaries. In the film, Loriot describes the steinlaus as a recently discovered yet endangered species of mite, 20 to 24 mm in length, that is able to consume up to 28 kg (62 lb) of stone a day – the film even features footage of building demolitions that are attributed to the creature’s insatiable appetite for rock. Seven years later, the joke was picked up by the editors of Psychrembel, a renowned German medical dictionary, who included the steinlaus as a fake entry in their 1983 edition. Loriot’s original description was expanded to an even more ludicrous extent, with the editors assigning the steinlaus a scientific name (Petrophaga lorioti, ‘Loriot’s stone-eater’), describing its use in the treatment of kidney and bladder stones, and even suggesting that its unusual diet was partly responsible for the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
In 1953, the Yorkshire sport historian M. C. Norris included the word yits in his Glossary of Northern English Dialect, variously defining it as a noun, ‘another name for a gardener’s edging tool’; as a verb, meaning to ‘hurl’ or ‘throw a great distance’; and as ‘an exclamation of accomplishment, probably a variant of “yes”’, which is ‘essentially equivalent to hurrah’. Although the word does exist in standard English – both as a variant of oats and as a verb meaning to ‘feed with oats’ – Norris’s use of it in his Glossary is fake. It was supported by a number of equally fictitious quotations supposedly taken from the works of various northern writers including Wordsworth, the Brontë sisters and the seventeenth-century Yorkshire poet Andrew Marvell.
The word zzxjoanw – supposedly pronounced ‘shaw’ – was included in a 250-page ‘pronouncing and defining dictionary of terms, instruments etc.’ featured in The Musical Guide, a 1903 reference work by the American historian and composer Rupert Hughes. Listed as a Maori word variously defined as a ‘drum’, ‘fife’ and ‘conclusion’, the word puzzled linguists and musicologists alike for decades, during which time it was reprinted in all editions of Hughes’s book and was widely discussed and quoted in several other similar titles. After considerable debate, given the word’s unlikely pronunciation, its random assortment of meanings and, crucially, the fact that the Maori language contains only fourteen letters (none of which are Z, X or J), zzxjoanw was eventually declared a hoax.