Did you know these words never made it out of the dictionary?

These are called ghost words

By Shashi Tharoor

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Published: Fri 20 Oct 2023, 5:39 PM

One of the most fascinating phenomena I have come across in reading about words and language is that of “ghost words”. Do you know what they are? Nor did I, till quite recently. They are words defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “words recorded in a dictionary or other reference work which are not actually used.” Why would a word be in a dictionary, one might well ask, if it is not actually used? Remarkably, there are several examples of ghost words.

The term was coined by Professor Walter William Skeat in 1886, in an address to the London Philological Society, describing words that had been erroneously recorded by dictionary-makers and had never featured in actual usage. He mentioned several, including “abacot”, the misspelling of “a bycoket” (a type of headwear); “kimes”, which came about as the misspelling of “knives”; and “morse” — no, not the code, which required a capital M anyway, but a misspelling of “nurse”. Skeat was alluding to an existing phenomenon, since such errors were rife. The word “phantomnation” appeared in the 1864 Webster’s Dictionary, defined as “appearance of a phantom, illusion,” and it was attributed to the poet Alexander Pope. But what Pope had written in his Odyssey was the line “all the phantom nations of the dead,” and the words “phantom” and “nation” had been run together — by an eccentric philologist, Richard Paul Jodrell, who believed in compound words — to make a word no one actually ever used.

Webster’s have much to answer for in the ghost words department, since their Second New International Dictionary of 1934 carried the word “dord” as a synonym for “density”, after misreading a note written by Austin M. Paterson, Webster’s chemistry editor at the time. The note said “D or d, cont./density,” and it referred to the uppercase letter D (or lowercase d) being used as an abbreviation for density. “D or d” got conflated into “dord,” creating a ghost-word — a word that, in fact, isn’t a word at all. Ghost words were usually the result of such transcription errors or typos. The error was discovered by a Merriam-Webster editor, and “dord” was dropped from the dictionary in 1947. But it was a ghost word for 13 years!

Webster’s is not singularly at fault. The 1755 Johnson’s Dictionary defined the word “foupe” as “to drive with a sudden impetuosity” and noted that the word was out of use. No wonder, because it never really existed — it misread the word “soupe”, itself a rare word meaning “swoop”. The same dictionary had “adventine”, a misprint of a Francis Bacon word, “adventive” (which also no one uses). And “cairbow”, a misreading of the deer-like “caribou”.

Sometimes, ghost words appear in dictionaries on purpose, just to protect copyright. Thus the New Oxford American Dictionary included in 2001 the ghost word “esquivalence”, defined as “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities”, to help the company track copyright violators who were lifting entries from them; if it appeared in another dictionary it would have had to have been stolen from them. (The fake did appear in Dictionary.com, from which it has now disappeared). The Americans call such deliberate fake words “mountweazels”, and the Germans have a term for them too: nihilartikel, meaning “no article” — which originated in a false entry in the German-language Wikipedia!

Occasionally, though, ghost words can become real, when people, not realising the error, start using them anyway. Thus “syllabus” is a transcription error of the word “sittybas” used by the Roman philosopher Cicero in the first century BC in his “Letters to Atticus” to mean “a label for a book or parchment” or “title-slip”. If you enjoy cherries, they come from the Old North French word ‘cherise’ which English speakers assumed was plural, giving birth to “cherry”. As did “orange”, which came from the Arabic naaranj; when people spoke of a naaranj it sounded to English ears like “an orange”! And “gravy” only became a word after a 14th-century translator misread a French cookbook that used grane to mean “anything used in cooking” at the time. But the English translation used a V by mistake, leading to the word “gravy” that is so commonly used, and consumed, today!

wknd@khaleejtimes.com