KELEMENOPY/kɛlɛmˈɛnəpɪ/
A sequential straight line through the middle of everything, leading nowhere.
Do not seek this word, gentle reader, in your dictionary of choice. It will not be there. This is a recent example of what Walter Skeat called ghost words. He coined the term in 1886 when he wrote about the problems of compiling a dictionary. He described them as “words which had never any real existence, being mere coinages due to the blunders of printers or scribes, or to the perfervid imaginations of ignorant or blundering editors”.
The most notorious example of the type is dord, supposedly a word meaning “density”, which was included in the 1934 edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary (it was originally d or D, an abbreviation for the word “density”, but was run together by an editing error into what looked like a word).
To such origins Mr Skeat might have added deliberate inventions by mischievous or bored editors. A famous example of this type is zzxjoanw, the last entry in Rupert Hughes’ Music Lovers’ Encyclopedia of 1903, and subsequent editions down to the 1950s, which was claimed to be a Maori word for a drum. It was later proved to be a hoax (not least because there is no Z, X or J in the Maori language).
This week’s Weird Word falls into a sub-category of hoaxing ghost words that are admitted not to exist. It was coined by John Ciardi, the American poet, in A Browser’s Dictionary in 1980. He said it was “from my own psychic warp, to see if anyone would notice, and because I have always dreamed of fathering a word”. (Haven’t we all?) The genesis of his creation was the sequence klmnop from the centre of the alphabet, with ten letters before and ten after it, which Mr Ciardi described as “a strictly sequential irrelevance”.
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