Since 1992
Print and digital marketing
By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Mountweazel
You have probably unknowingly crossed paths with a mountweazel or two, a truly delightful word. It sounds like an animal or an insult, but it is neither. A mountweazel is a fake entry purposely inserted into dictionaries, encyclopedias or any published reference materials to protect copyright infringement. Map makers frequently add fake places or streets to their maps to make sure no one is copying their product. Since the information is basically the same, map publishers can easily profit from another’s work. The 1978 state of Michigan’s official highway roadmaps included fake towns in Ohio. One was Beatosu, as in “Beat OSU” for Ohio State University. Another fake town was Goblu, as in Go Blue, the University of Michigan’s colors. Clearly the map makers were big Michigan sports fans. When mapmakers added the town of Agloe at the intersection of two dirt roads in New York state as a mountweazel, it became a real town. Someone built a general store there in the 1950s and named it the Agloe General Store after seeing the location on a map. When Rand McNally created a map containing Agloe, the company was unsuccessfully sued because the information came from the county.
The 1943 edition of Webster’s Twentieth Century Dictionary included an entry for “jungftak,” defined as a one-winged Persian bird, the male having only a right wing and the female a left wing, that can only fly when hooked together. Some mountweazels are less obvious. A recent edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary contained the word “esquivalience,” defined as the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities. Even professional Word Nerds were fooled.
Why are these called mountweazels? They are named for the false entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 fourth edition of The New Columbia Encyclopedia, a bogus listing found between the entries of Mount Vernon and Mount Wilson Observatory. The non-existent Lillian is described as a celebrated designer of fountains, photographer of rural mailboxes and native of Bangs, Ohio, who died at age 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles Magazine.
A mountweazel is also known as a trap street, paper town or phantom settlement on maps and a nihilartikel, German for “nothing article” in written publications. Because it’s a fake word to start with, determining if the word itself is a valid dictionary entry is a bit of a logical paradox.
