Talk:Ghost word

untitled
The article has some good information but is hard to follow for readers not familiar with the subject and lacking in knowledge of the specific examples given.

Md84419 (talk) 11:57, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, I have had a go... Do you see any improvement, or is it now worse? JonRichfield (talk) 14:55, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Teh, pwnd, adn moar....
What about these and similar words? I know they fit other definitions, but shouldn't they be mentioned? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.30.55.247 (talk) 22:16, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

This article sounds like it was written by a valley girl, ya know? I know right?

one example: "exhibited something like a hundred more specimens"

It is also opinionated and confusing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.96.233.254 (talk) 17:15, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

"Lede," as used for the first paragraph of an article, belongs here. Wastrel Way (talk) 12:03, 15 October 2019 (UTC) Eric

FTF's Tag problem: New Citations etc
Since every paragraph in the text except for the lede has specific associated citations from specifically relevant sources, or refers to appropriate articles (such as neologism, back-formation and false etymology) that have their own citations that in this article would be inappropriate, it is not clear what citations or what nature of citations are deficient. Please clarify so that I can make good the deficiency, or supplement it independently. JonRichfield (talk) 08:41, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

幽霊文字
There are ghost characters or ghost ideographs, which are the CJK equivalent of ghost words (bad entries in East Asian dictionaries for characters rather than words). Should we create an article at ghost character for this? --Makkachin (talk) 22:54, 23 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I suspect that there is not enough well-sourced material to warrant a separate Ghost character (dictionaries) article. Is there an equivalent article in any of the Asian-language editions of Wikipedia? If you have a good source then please add a section to this article. Verbcatcher (talk) 04:39, 26 August 2017 (UTC)

Kusege
Is the section about "kusege" an appropriate example of the ghost word? The word "kusege" does exist and have a meaning, and only the English definition is meaningless. According to this article, the definition of "ghost word" is "a word published in a dictionary or similarly authoritative reference work, having rarely, if ever, been used in practice, and hitherto having been meaningless". Judging from this definition, I think "kusege" is not the example of the ghost word, but of the Lexicographic error. We should drop this section from this article. --saebou (talk) 02:15, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

στήτη
In the first example, "The supposed Homeric Greek word στήτη (stēmē) = "woman"...", the second tau (τ) has been throughout transliterated as "m" rather than "t". I've checked the Greek, and it is in fact a tau and not a mu, so I've corrected the article. However, I don't have Fagles handy; is that transliteration error from Fagles (in which case, should we note it?) or added to the article? --Etherjammer (talk) 21:39, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

I suggest broadening the article to include ghost meanings.
I suggest that the title of the article be changed to Ghost words and ghost meanings.

Ghost meanings develop when a definer misunderstands a text. For example, on 19 June 1855 Charles Dickens wrote a letter to Frances Trollope in which he said, inter alia, "I cannot have the pleasure of seeing the famous 'medium' to-night, for I have some theatricals at home," where he intended the word theatricals to mean 'theatrical performances', but an excerpter for the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary copied only the last six words of the passage and the rest of the passage has never seen the light of day in any edition or printing of that dictionary. As a result, a definer for the first edition misunderstood "I have some theatricals at home" to refer to certain objects that Dickens kept in his house, guessed that he had in mind stage properties, and so defined the word, when in fact such a meaning has never been attested (in Dickens and elsewhere), it in fact being likely that it has never existed. The ghost meaning *'stage properties' thus got into the first edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, was from that edition copied into the second one, and was from the latter copied into the third edition, where it remains today. Seeing that definition but not realizing that it was a ghost meaning, a definer for Webster's Third New International Dictionaries of the English Language: Unabridged (published in 1961) who did not see the full passage either, thought that the objects in question could be theater properties or theater memorabilia, and so defined the word, as a result of which that dictionary carries the ghost meaning 'theater properties or memorabilia' to this day. Had the definers read a larger excerpt from the letter they would have realized that theatricals refers not to objects but to an event.

The foregoing is based on this article:

S. Valkemirer (talk) 17:16, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Another article on the subject
This article should in some way be worked into the text:

Clauson, Gerard. 1955. "Turkish Ghost Words." The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. No. 3/4. October. Pp. 124-138S. Valkemirer (talk) 23:05, 4 September 2020 (UTC).

kuse 癖 "habit; vice"
I don’t know enough about the topic to make a change here but I noticed that when you go to the wicktionary from that link it defines kuse 癖 as “peculiar”. Maybe someone with a better understanding of the translation can look into this and see if there is an error there? ExistentialElation (talk) 18:23, 9 May 2023 (UTC)