THERE’S NOTHING SCARY ABOUT DICTIONARY “GHOST WORDS.” They’re the result of misreading, mistranscribing, and plain old editorial goofing. Here’s a selection gleaned from several Internet sources.
Dord. Wikipedia recounts, “The word dord… was accidentally created, as a ghost word, by the staff of G. and C. Merriam Company (now part of Merriam-Webster) in the New International Dictionary, second edition (1934). That dictionary defined the term as a synonym for density used in physics and chemistry…. On 31 July 1931, Austin M. Patterson, the dictionary’s chemistry editor, sent in a slip reading ‘D or d, cont./density.’ This was intended to add ‘density’ to the existing list of words that the letter ‘D’ can abbreviate.”
Image from Merriam-Webster Wordplay.
Abacot. Wikipedia recounts, “The term was coined by Professor Walter William Skeat in his annual address as president of the Philological Society in 1886: “The word ‘abacot’ was “defined by Webster as ‘the cap of state formerly used by English kings, wrought into the figure of two crowns.’ It was rightly and wisely rejected by our Editor on the ground that there is no such word, the alleged form being due to a complete mistake … due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imaginations of ignorant or blundering editors.”
It evolved from mistranscriptions of “bycoket,’ derived from the Old French word for such a cap.
A Medieval woman wearing a bycoket. Image from Wiktionary.
Syllabus. Dictionary.com describes that Roman philosopher Cicero “wrote two ‘Letters to Atticus,’ and they contained the word sittybas (or maybe sittubas)…. This was a Greek word meaning a ‘label for a papyrus roll.’ ”
Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 BC–43 BC, Roman statesman, scholar, philosopher,and Academic skeptic. First-century AD bust of Cicero at the Capitoline Museums, Rome, via Wikipedia.
“However,” the website continued, “ it’s suspected that one printing of this work misspelled it as syllabus. The spelling stuck, and so it began to also mean ‘a label for a papyrus roll’ as well. This morphed into its current meaning: (an outline or other brief statement of the main points of a discourse, the subjects of a course of lectures, the contents of a curriculum, etc.) in the mid-1600s.”
Kime. Another from Dictionary.com: “This word appeared (or mistakenly appeared, perhaps?) in the Edinburgh Review, in the context of a sentence referring to Hindus stabbing their hands with kimes.… While the natural assumption would be that a kime is some sinister torture device, it was just a typo for the word knives.”
Mountweazel. Also from this website, “Sometimes, words aren’t the only fictional things that show up in historical and educational works of information. In 1975, the New Columbia Encyclopedia included an entry on one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, supposedly an American fountain designer who did a photo book about rural American mailboxes. The encyclopedia wrote that sadly, she died in an explosion while working on a piece for Combustibles magazine. (This should have been a tip-off to some.)
Indeed, SimanaitisSays caught on to it as “a decoy entry in a reference work, such as a dictionary or encyclopedia, secretly planted among the genuine entries to catch other publishers in the act of copying content.”
Japanese Ghost Words. Wikipedia writes, “The JIS X 0208 standard, the most widespread system to handle Japanese language with computers since 1978, has entries for 12 kanji that have no known use and were probably included by mistake (for example 彁). They are called ghost characters (yūrei moji, “ghost characters“) and are still supported by most computer systems.”
Image from Writing in Armenian.
Gee, I wonder if there are any Armenian ghosts in my computer?
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025