Ghost Words!

Do you know what these English words mean: dord, abacot, esquivalience, momblishness, phantomnation? They’re GHOST WORDS — real words that haunt the English language. Here's their story.

Ghost Words

Ghost words are words that appear in the dictionary even though they weren’t always real. Most are mistakes, the result of a typographic or other error. Some were introduced purposely as potential proof of any future copyright violation.¹ All of them have a story.

Dord

First up is one of my favorites, “dord,” which Webster’s New International Dictionary defined eight decades ago as “density.” But there was no such word. Here’s what happened:

Physicists represent density with the letter “d.” Because one job of a dictionary is to explain abbreviations, the editors reasonably thought it would be a good idea to include an entry explaining that “d” means “density.” Frequently upper-case and lower-case letters mean different things in physics, but not here. So the entry was created for “d or D.” But the spaces got erased and the capitalization adjusted, and the brand new word “dord” started to haunt the English language.

Abacot

Our next ghost word takes us on a voyage through what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “a remarkable series of blunders and ignorant reproductions of error” — and also through medieval fashion. The word is “abacot.” But it should be “bycoket.”

A bycoket is a kind of hat 🎩. The word was also — at a time when spelling was largely a matter of personal preference — printed as “bicocket.”

Then a typo half a millennium ago turned “bicocket” into “abococket,” which was altered to “abococke,” and — perhaps enjoying a short life as “abacoc” — improved to “abacot.” From there the word spread far and wide, appearing in English and foreign-language dictionaries. In the 19th century, pictures of the (non-existent) abacot were added to some reference works.

This summary comes from information in the Oxford English Dictionary, which notes that both “abacot” and “bycoket” are “obsolete.”

But even obsolete ghosts are real.

Esquivalience

Do you know what “esquivalience” means? It’s “the deliberate shirking of responsibility.” Or is it? 🤔

This one is technically a Nihilartikel, also called a mountweazel — a fabricated entry in a reference work whose purpose is to identify any future theft of intellectual property.

The word allegedly dates to the 19th century and derives from the French “esquiver,” meaning to “dodge, slink away.” It first appeared in the 2001 New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD).

The New Yorker explains (“Not a Word” by Henry Alford, August 29, 2005) that NOAD purposely added a bogus word. Then the inclusion of the fake was leaked, along with the fact that it started with “e.” So (what else could possibly be done?) an independent investigation was launched, eventually narrowing down the culprit to six entries.

Those suspects were sent to a bunch of lexicographical authorities, seven of whom singled out “esquivalience,” for various reasons: Wendalyn Nichols, then the former editorial director of Random House Reference, didn’t think the ending “-alience” matched the French verb. Steve Kleinedler of the American Heritage Dictionary didn’t like the stress pattern. (But the stress pattern of “lexicographical authorities” is okay??) And my friend and (at the time) New York Times puzzle editor Will Shortz couldn’t “believe such a thing goes back to the nineteenth century.”

Eventually Erin McKean, NOAD’s editor in chief, unapologetically confirmed that one of her editors had invented “esquivalience.” But not before the word appeared on such authoritative sites as Dictionary Dot Com, with their own Webster’s New Millennium cited as the source.

That’s how I like my irony. A word that means to shirk responsibility was irresponsibly, even esquivaliently added to a dictionary.

The ghosts of English are smiling today.

Momblishness

Never forget the word “momblishness,” our 4th ghost word! It now means “muttering talk.” But the word should have been “moubliemies,” part of the phrase “ne moubliemies,” which is French for forget-me-not flowers. 🌼

Chaucer wrote about nature in his poem “The Assembly of Ladies,” which starts: “In Septembre, at fallyng of the leef...” Here’s the 9th stanza:

With margarites growyng in ordynaunce /

To shewe hem self as folk went to and fro, /

That to behold it was a grete plesaunce; /

And how they were accompanyed with mo, /

Ne m’oublie-mies and sovenez also; [emphasis added] /

The poore penses ne were nat disloged there /

No, no, God wote, theyr place was every where.

His poetic point was that “remember-mes” joined the “forget-me-nots.” (“Wote” in the last line means “knew.”)

However, a 1532 publication of Chaucer’s works changed the phrase to the delightful “momblishness.” Then in 1721 Nathan Bailey published An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (and how can you not love a title that starts “an universal”?), which defined the 1532 mistake as an “old” word meaning “talk, muttering.”

So “momblishness” has been haunting English for half a millennium. Or maybe more. Maybe Chaucer had a hidden message, that God knew of ghost words that “theyr place was every where.”

Phantomnation

If ever there was a time for phantomnation (“the appearance of a phantom”), it’s Halloween. And the word is particularly appropriate, because, like a phantom, the word itself is a ghost — our 5th ghost word!

In one sense, the word started with Homer’s νεκύων κατατεθνηώτων, the “tribes of the dead” in his Odyssey². (See how I suavely connect ghost words to ancient wisdom?) When Alexander Pope translated Homer’s Greek into rhyming English in 1725, he opted for “phantom-nations.” Nice. But then came along Richard Paul Jodrell, who in 1820 wrote a Philology on the English Language, and he didn’t believe in hyphens. So he listed Pope’s phrase as the single word “phantomnation.”

Perhaps on the pattern of “condemnation,” the word made so much sense as “appearance of a phantom” that it stuck, surviving in the light for many decades (Webster’s of 1864, e.g.), before returning to the very netherworld where it started nearly three millennia ago.

But, along with some of our other ghost words, don’t you think it’s time to revive it? I do. So go ahead. This evening tell trick-or-treaters how much you like their phantomnation. With any luck, they’ll complain about your momblishness. Then you can lament the esquivalience of kids today.

Happy Halloween! 👻

1. The idea behind these purposeful ghost words is that they can be proof of copyright violation if they end up in another edition. After all, they couldn’t have been independently discovered. They are invented. Such words are also called “Nihilartikels,” from the Latin for “nothing” and the German for “article.” They are nothing-articles. Another name for them is “mountweazels,” eponymously from “Lillian Virginia Mountweazel,” who was invented by the New Columbia Encyclopedia for copyright-protection purposes.

2. Book 11, 35.