The Fake Words Hidden in Real Dictionaries

In 1975 the New Columbia Encyclopedia included a brief biographical entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer, killed in an explosion while shooting an assignment for Combustibles magazine. She had not existed. The entry was deliberate — a tripwire planted by the editors so that if a competing reference work copied it, the copying could be proved in court.

The technique is older than reference books. Cartographers had been doing the same thing with "trap streets" and phantom hamlets for decades. Reference editors borrowed the idea and updated it for their format. The New Yorker writer Henry Alford profiled the New Columbia hoax in 2005 and the term mountweazel stuck.

The most discussed lexical specimen sits in the New Oxford American Dictionary's 2001 second edition: esquivalience, defined as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities." Editor Erin McKean confirmed in 2005 that the word was invented to protect the dictionary's electronic version. By the time she said so it had already escaped — Dictionary.com had ingested it and a few real-world writers had used it earnestly. The trap caught its target and a few bystanders.

This is the awkward thing about a copyright trap. The bait has to look exactly like the thing it is hidden among, which means a successful mountweazel is, in some small way, indistinguishable from a real word. Cite anything obscure-sounding twice before you use it.