mountweazel
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
25
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
2
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A nihilartikel.
noun
Alternative letter-case form of Mountweazel.
Example Sentences
- "[…]the remaining three hundred and sixty words were then vetted with a battery of references. Six potential Mountweazels emerged."
- "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.” Before we got to the big questions, I asked if she knew what fake encyclopedia entries are sometimes called now, and she said she didn’t. “They’re called mountweazels,” I said."
- "“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.”"
- "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."
- "And it seems that modern dictionaries still occasionally use a mountweazel to flush out cheats. One famous made-up word, esquivalience, appeared in the 2001 edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary."
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.