While the existence of specters and spirits may be up for debate, ghost words are a real concept — they’re words that “come into existence by error rather than by normal linguistic transmission,” according to Dictionary.com.
Despite their name, they’re not a very spooky problem, but they do plague all dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary includes an 1887 reference calling them “mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes… or blundering editors.” Imagine a manuscript with a typo or misprinted text. An untrained editor or printer may assume that the word was added by the original writer for a reason, and thus will let it slide through. Only after the work is finally published will the mistake become apparent, as the newly printed “ghost word” is accidentally thrust into the collective lexicon.
One of the earliest known examples of a ghost word is “dord,” which 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 spotted and finally removed.
Sometimes the ghost word gets adopted by the public and enters the lexicon. That’s exactly how we got the word “syllabus,” which was originally a misprint of the Greek sittybos (meaning “parchment label” or “table of contents”). The mistake went unnoticed during the editing process, and “syllabus” was being used as a new word by the 1650s.
Bob Ross used to say, “We don’t make mistakes; we have happy accidents.” And when it comes to the coining of ghost words, that’s the appropriate outlook to have.
