Tuesday, January 7, 2025

What are “ghost words” in the dictionary?

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What are "ghost words" in the dictionary?

Don't be scared — ghost words are simple mistakes that turned into new entries in the dictionary. Learn how some of these terms became familiar words.

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G host words are a funny thing. No, we're not talking about the word "boo" as defined by Scaryam-Webster's Dictionary. Ghost words are a real concept referring to words that "come into existence by error rather than by normal linguistic transmission," according to Dictionary.com. But don't be spooked, because it's actually a simple concept to grasp.

As per the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest written use of the term "ghost words" comes back in 1887, in reference to words, "being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes… or blundering editors." In other words, imagine a manuscript with typos or misprinted text. An untrained editor may assume that those words were added by the original writer for a reason, and thus'll let them slide through the editing process. Only after the work is finally published will the mistake become apparent, as the "ghost words" are accidentally thrust into the collective lexicon.

One of the earliest known examples of a ghost word is "dord," which mistakenly showed up in Webster's New International Dictionary from 1934 to 1939. According to Snopes, an editor mistook the abbreviation "D or d" — meaning "density" — for the single word "dord." The ghost word spent a few years in the dictionary before it was finally removed.

Another ghost word that we continue to use today is "syllabus," which was originally a misprint of the Greek sittybos — meaning "parchment label" or "table of contents." But the mistake went unnoticed during the editing process, and "syllabus" became a new word of its own by the 1650s.

Like Bob Ross used to say, "We don't make mistakes, we have happy accidents." When it comes to the concept of ghost words, that's the appropriate outlook to have.

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