ghost word

If that story is true, then the name is a material example of a ghost word.

Her mouth shaped ghost words as her head turned, searching.

Dord is a ghost word, a word that has no definition.

All these words and many more have remained in common usage, but they may well have been ghost words in origin.

Dord is the only known ghost word in the Merriam Webster's Dictionary history.

The latter is a ghost word, escalated to a level of meta-category through historical accident and the inertia of intellectual prescription.

A ghost word is a word that is published in a dictionary but is rarely, if ever, used in practical speaking.

Translating kui 夔 as "walrus" exemplifies a ghost word.

A recent, incorrect use of the term "ghost word" refers to coining a new word implied logically from a real word, often etymologically incorrectly.

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.

Alternatively, ghost words sometimes have been published or come into use because of errors in communication, such as misinterpretation, mispronunciation, misreading, or typographical or linguistic confusion.

In 1940, bound books began appearing without the ghost word but with a new abbreviation (although inspection of printed copies well into the 1940s show "dord" still present).

Nostalgia may not be what it used to be, as Simone Signoret suggested in the title of her autobiography, but the ghost words of our youth haunt us still.

Somewhat incidentally in the perspective of his main body of work, Skeat coined the term ghost word and was a leading expert in this treacherous and difficult subject.

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".

Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, ghost words and nihil articles, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps, and directories.

The voice was a rasping whisper without depth or emotion, a strained vibration which hung on the air like the gossamer web of a spider, light and frail, a quiver among the shadows, a ghost voice whispering ghost words.

In principle nothing prevents a back-formation from becoming a something like a ghost word, but it is not easy to find examples, and as a rule it would clash with Skeat's precise definition, which requires that the word forms have "no meaning".

Once authoritatively published, a ghost word commonly becomes widely copied and takes a long time to be erased from usage (e.g. "morse", as discussed in this article); sometimes such a word even comes into permanent usage (e.g. "scapegoat", also described below).

Dord is a notable error in lexicography, an accidental creation, or ghost word, of the G. and C. Merriam Company's staff included in the second (1934) edition of its New International Dictionary, in which the term is defined as "density".