Ghost word

A ghost word is a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work, having rarely, if ever, been used in practice, and hitherto having been meaningless (for example "kime" or "abacot" (compare "bycoket")).^[1] As a rule a ghost word will have originated from an error, such as a misinterpretation, mispronunciation, misreading, or from typographical or linguistic confusion.

Once authoritatively published, a ghost word occasionally may be copied widely and take a long time to be erased from usage (if it ever does) (e.g. "morse", as described below).

Origin of the term

The term ghost words was coined and originally presented in public by Professor Walter William Skeat in his annual address as president of the Philological Society in 1886.^[1] He said in part:

Of all the work which the Society has at various times undertaken, none has ever had so much interest for us, collectively, as the New English Dictionary. Dr Murray, as you will remember, wrote on one occasion a most able article, in order to justify himself in omitting from the Dictionary the word abacot, 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. ...

I propose, therefore, to bring under your notice a few more words of the abacot type; words which will come under our Editor's notice in course of time, and which I have little doubt that he will reject. As it is convenient to have a short name for words of this character, I shall take leave to call them "ghost-words." ... I only allow the title of ghost-words to such words, or rather forms, as have no meaning whatever. (Emphasis not present in the original).

...I can adduce at least two that are somewhat startling. The first is kime... The original ... appeared in the Edinburgh Review for 1808. " The Hindoos... have some very savage customs... Some swing on hooks, some run kimes through their hands..."

It turned out that "kimes" was a misprint for "knives", but the word gained currency for some time. A more drastic example followed, also cited in Skeat's address:^[2]

A similar instance occurs in a misprint of a passage of one of Scott's novels, but here there is the further amusing circumstance that the etymology of the false word was settled to the satisfaction of some of the readers. In the majority of editions of The Monastery, we read: ... dost thou so soon morse thoughts of slaughter?

This word is nothing but a misprint of nurse; but in Notes and Queries two independent correspondents accounted for the word morse etymologically. One explained it as to prime, as when one primes a musket, from O. Fr. amorce, powder for the touchhole (Cotgrave), and the other by to bite (Lat. mordere), hence "to indulge in biting, stinging or gnawing thoughts of slaughter". The latter writes: "That the word as a misprint should have been printed and read by millions for fifty years without being challenged and altered exceeds the bounds of probability." Yet when the original manuscript of Sir Walter Scott was consulted, it was found that the word was there plainly written nurse.

One example of such an edition of "The Monastery" was published by the Edinburgh University Press in 1820.^[3]

More examples

In his address, Skeat exhibited about 100 more specimens that he had collected.

Other examples include:

• The supposed Homeric Greek word στήτη = "woman", which arose thus: In Iliad Book 1 line 6 is the phrase διαστήτην ἐρίσαντε = "two [= Achilles and Agamemnon ] stood apart making strife". However someone unfamiliar with dual number verb inflections read it as διά στήτην ἐρίσαντε = "two making strife because of a στήτη", and he guessed that στήτη meant the woman Briseis who was the subject of the strife.^[4]
• The placename Sarum, which arose by misunderstanding of the abbreviation Sar~ used in a medieval manuscript to mean some early form such as "Sarisberie" (= Salisbury).^[5]
• As an example of an editing mistake, "dord" was defined as a noun meaning density (mass per unit volume). When the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary was being prepared, an index card that read "D or d" with reference to the word "density" was incorrectly misfiled as a word instead of an abbreviation. The entry existed in more than one printing from 1934 to 1947.^[6][7]
• The OED explains the ghost word Phantomnation as "Appearance of a phantom; illusion. Error for phantom nation".^[8] Alexander Pope's (1725) translation of the Odyssey originally said, "The Phantome-nations of the dead". Richard Paul Jodrell's (1820) Philology of the English Language, which omitted hyphens from compounds, entered it as one word, "Phantomnation, a multitude of spectres". Lexicographers copied this error into various dictionaries, such as, "Phantomnation, illusion. Pope." (Worcester, 1860, Philology of the English Language), and "Phantomnation, appearance as of a phantom; illusion. (Obs. and rare.) Pope." (Webster, 1864, An American dictionary of the English language).^[9]
• The Japanese word kusege (癖毛, compounding kuse 癖 "habit; vice" and 毛 ke "hair", "frizzy hair") was mistranslated as vicious hair in the authoritative Kenkyūsha's New Japanese-English Dictionary from the first edition (1918) to the fourth (1974), and corrected in the fifth edition (2003) "twisted [kinky, frizzy] hair; hair that stands up".^[10] This phantom word was not merely an unnoticed lexicographical error, generations of dictionary users copied the mistake. For example, a Tokyo hospital of cosmetic surgery had a long-running display advertisement in the Asian edition of Newsweek that read, "Kinky or vicious hair may be changed to a lovely, glossy hair" [sic].^[11] This hair-straightening ad was jokingly used in the "Kinky Vicious" title of a 2011 Hong Kong iPhoneography photo exhibition.^[12]
• The JIS X 0208 standard, the most widespread system to handle Japanese language with computers since 1978, has entries for 12 kanjis that have no known use and were probably included by mistake (for example: 彁). They are called 幽霊文字 (yūrei moji, "ghost characters") and are still supported by most computer systems (see: JIS X 0208#Kanji from unknown sources).
• Hsigo, an apparently erroneous output from optical character recognition software for "hsiao", a creature from Chinese mythology. The typographical error appeared in several limited-audience publications but spread around the World Wide Web after the creation of a Wikipedia article about the term (which has since been corrected), due to its numerous mirrors and forks.
• In his book Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought, Dmitri Borgmann shows how feamyng, a purported collective noun for ferrets which appeared in several dictionaries, is actually the result of a centuries-long chain of typographical errors (from BUSYNESS to BESYNESS to FESYNES to FESNYNG to FEAMYNG).^[13][14]

Speculative examples

Many neologisms, including those that eventually develop into established usages, are of obscure origin, and some might well have originated as ghost words through illiteracy, such as the term "okay". However, establishing the true origin often is not possible, partly for lack of documentation, and sometimes through obstructive efforts on the part of pranksters. The most popular etymology of the word pumpernickel bread - that Napoleon described it as "C'est pain pour Nicole!", being only fit for his horse - is thought to be a deliberate hoax. "Quiz" also has been associated with apparently deliberate false etymology. All these words and many more have remained in common usage, but they may well have been ghost words in origin.^[15]

Back-formation

A recent, incorrect use of the term "ghost word" refers to coining a new word implied logically from a real word, often etymologically incorrectly. The correct term for such a derivation is back-formation, a word that has been established since the late 19th century.^[1] An example is "beforemath" which is derived from "aftermath". A back-formation cannot become a ghost word, as as a rule it would clash with Skeat's precise definition, which requires that the word forms have "no meaning".^[1]

Troublesome ghost words

Ghost words and similar errors and creations, certainly including back-formations, usually are at least troublesome to philologists as a source of neologisms and linguistic confusion.^[1] More philosophically, one might as well regard them as a source of linguistic challenge and entertainment; probably most of them disappear harmlessly, and those that enter common use might well gain general acceptance simply because they express something comfortably, or otherwise meet a need. The ultimate origins of most words in any language are in essence no more respectable.^[16]

See also

• Corruption (linguistics)
• Dord
• False etymology
• Fictitious entry
• Folk etymology
• Howler (error)

References

1. Skeat, Walter William; Presidential address on 'Ghost-Words' in: 'Transactions of the Philological Society, 1885-7, pages 343-374'; Published for the society by Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, London, 1887. May be downloaded at: http://archive.org/details/transact188500philuoft
2. Wheatley, Henry Benjamin; Literary Blunders; A Chapter in the “History of Human Error”; Publisher: Elliot Stock, London 1893
3. Scott, Walter. The Monastery. Chapter 10, page 156. Published by Edinburgh University Press. 1820. May be downloaded from: http://archive.org/details/monasteryaroman00scotgoog
4. Leaf, Walter. The Iliad. Macmillan. 1900. Available at
5. David Mills (20 October 2011). A Dictionary of British Place-Names. Oxford University Press. pp. 526–. ISBN 978-0-19-960908-6.
6. "Ghost Word" with Emily Brewster, part of the "Ask the Editor" series at Merriam-Webster.com
7. "dord". Dictionary.com, LLC. Retrieved February 21, 2012. In sorting out and separating abbreviations from words in preparing the dictionary's second edition, a card marked "D or d" meaning "density" somehow migrated from the "abbreviations" stack to the "words" stack.
8. Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM, Version 4.0, Oxford University Press (2009).
9. William Shepard Walsh; Henry Collins Walsh; William H. Garrison; Samuel R. Harris (1890). American Notes and Queries. Westminister Publishing Company. page 93 Available at:
10. Watanabe Toshirō (渡邊敏郎), Edmund R. Skrzypczak, and Paul Snowden, eds. (2003), Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary (新和英大辞典), 5th ed., Kenkyusha, 790.
11. Michael Carr (1983), "A Lexical Ghost Story: *Vicious hair", Jinbun Kenkyū (人文研究), 66: 29-44. Carr (p. 40) suggests "vicious hair" for kusege (癖毛) originated through false analogy from Kenkyusha's waraguse (悪癖 "bad/vicious habit; vice") entries.
12. Dan Pordes, iPhone photos like you've never seen, CNN Travel, 20 September 2011.
13. Borgmann, Dmitri A. (1967). Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. pp. 79–80, 146, 251–254. OCLC 655067975.
14. Eckler, Jr., A. Ross (November 2005). "The Borgmann Apocrypha". Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics 38 (4): 258–260.
15. Wendell Herbruck (November 2008). Word Histories - A Glossary of Unusual Word Origins. Read Books. ISBN 978-1-4437-3186-7. Available at:
16. Richard White (1 January 1889). Words and Their Uses. Richard West. ISBN 978-0-8274-3741-8. available at:

External links

• Transactions of the Philological Society