Where it sits
A hapax legomenon has one real use; a ghost word has none, only a record of a mistake.
What it doesn't mean
That's a fictitious entry, sometimes called a mountweazel. A ghost word is accidental: it comes from a blunder by a printer, scribe or editor.
Rare words were used, even if only once. Skeat reserved the name for forms that 'have no meaning whatever', because nobody ever meant them.
What it really means
A ghost word is a word that haunts the dictionary without ever having lived. Nobody used it. It came from a mistake, and then it got written down by someone who trusted the mistake.
The name comes from Walter William Skeat, the British philologist, in his 1886 address as president of the Philological Society. He was praising the editor of the great New English Dictionary (the future OED) for leaving out abacot, a supposed royal cap that turned out to be a blunder. Skeat proposed a short name for words of that type. He would call them "ghost-words", and he reserved the title for forms that, in his words, "have no meaning whatever".
His examples show how they happen. In 1808, the Edinburgh Review described people running "kimes" through their hands. Kimes was a misprint for knives, but it was copied as a word in its own right. That is the usual path: a printer drops a letter, a scribe misreads a hand, an editor runs two words together. If later writers copy the mistake rather than checking the source, the error starts to look like evidence.
The most famous case came from inside a dictionary. In 1934, Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition included dord, "density", because a slip reading "D or d" had been read as one word. Merriam-Webster still calls it the only ghost word it has published.
Ghost words are different from fake entries planted on purpose, which are called mountweazels, and from rare words used only once. A word used once is real. A ghost word was never used at all.
Where it comes from
- 1808
'Kimes' appears in the Edinburgh Review — a misprint for 'knives' that later gained currency, one of Skeat's examples (Wikipedia, quoting Skeat).
- 1886
Walter William Skeat coins 'ghost-words' in his presidential address to the Philological Society.
- 1887
The first known use of 'ghost word' in Merriam-Webster's entry.
- 1934–1947
'Dord', a misread 'D or d', sits in Webster's New International Dictionary — the most famous ghost word of all.
In real life
- The editor found a ghost word in the old glossary: a scribe's slip, faithfully copied for a century.
- Checking the source is how you catch a ghost word — if every citation traces back to one misprint, the word was never real.
- Her thesis lists the ghost words that crept into Victorian dictionaries from misread manuscripts.
Questions
Q01What is a ghost word?
A word that exists only because of a mistake — a misprint, a misreading or a copying error — and was never genuinely used. It gets recorded in a dictionary or reference work as if it were real until someone checks the evidence.
Q02Who coined the term ghost word?
Walter William Skeat, in 1886, in his presidential address to the Philological Society. He said he would call them 'ghost-words', and kept the name for forms with no real meaning at all.
Q03What is the most famous ghost word?
Dord. It appeared in Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition (1934), as a word for 'density', because a slip reading 'D or d' was misread as one word. It was spotted in 1939.
Q04Is a ghost word the same as a fake dictionary entry?
No. A ghost word is accidental. A fictitious entry, or mountweazel, is invented on purpose, usually to catch anyone copying the reference book.
Sources
- Ghost word — Wikipedia (quoting Skeat's 1886 address).
- ghost word — Merriam-Webster.
- 'Dord': A Ghost Word — Merriam-Webster.