mountweazel
Feb. 23rd, 2026 07:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordmountweazel or Mountweazel (MOUNT-wee-zuhl) - n., a deliberately fictitious entry in an encyclopedia or academic work, generally identifiable as false, planted among the genuine entries to catch other publishers in the act of copying content.
A form of copyright trap. TIL the German word for this is a nihilartikel, now sometimes also used in English. Coined in 2005 by Henry Alford in The New Yorker from an fictitious entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia for one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a supposed photographer who died on assignment while covering an explosion for the equally fictitious Combustibles magazine.
---L.
A form of copyright trap. TIL the German word for this is a nihilartikel, now sometimes also used in English. Coined in 2005 by Henry Alford in The New Yorker from an fictitious entry in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia for one Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a supposed photographer who died on assignment while covering an explosion for the equally fictitious Combustibles magazine.
---L.
no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 03:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 04:20 pm (UTC)And dictionaries! Apparently ...
no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-23 08:49 pm (UTC)Yes -- yes, you do.