Mountweazel

English

Alternative forms

• mountweazel

Etymology

Coined by Henry Alford in the The New Yorker from an entry for a fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia.^[1][2]

Noun

Mountweazel (plural Mountweazels)

1. A nihilartikel.
   • 2018 December 31, Nick Norlen, “‘Glitch of the Pentagon’: There’s a reason you might not have heard of this monster”, in Washington Post‎, →ISSN:

     Tweedy-Holmes is now a professional photographer, and portions of her website bio read a bit like a mountweazel: “Her images of the male nude were exhibited extensively to critical acclaim in the 1970s and are among the first art photographs of this subject by an American woman.”

   • 2020, Eley Williams, The Liar's Dictionary‎, Anchor, →ISBN:

     “I need to talk to you about mountweazels.”
     “Mountweazels,” I repeated.
     “There are mistakes. In the dictionary,” David said. […] He assumed a defensive tone. “Well. Not mistakes. Not-quite mistakes. They're words that are meant to be there but not meant to be there.”

   • 2021, Rochelle Lieber, Introducing Morphology, third edition, Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 32:

     Lest you think that lexicographers are humorless […] , let's consider the issues of mountweazels mentioned briefly above. As Henry Alford reveals in the August 29, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001) planted the non-existent word esquivalience […] among the entries for the letter “e” to catch potential dictionary pirates.

Hypernyms

• copyright trap

References

1. Henry Alford (2005 August 21) “Not a Word”, in The New Yorker‎, →ISSN: “[…] the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references. Six potential Mountweazels emerged.”
2. William H. Harris, Judith S. Levey, editors (1975), “Mountweazel, Lilian Virginia”, in The New Columbia Encyclopedia, New York: Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 1850: “Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine.”