Tuesday word: Mountweazel

[simplyn2deep]

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Mountweazel (noun)
mountweazel [mount-wee-zuhl]

noun
1. a decoy entry in a reference work, such as a dictionary or encyclopedia, secretly planted among the genuine entries to catch other publishers in the act of copying content.

Origin: First recorded in 1975–80; from a fictitious entry in the fourth edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia, Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, who supposedly died on assignment while covering an explosion for the fictitious Combustibles magazine

Example Sentences
She thought it was Karen Tweedy-Holmes — who, she informed me, was also the creator of Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.
From Washington Post

Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964.
From Washington Post

As it turned out, Ms. Mountweazel was also introduced to the world in the NCE.
From Washington Post

“As the one on Ms. Mountweazel shows, the writers and editors on the fourth edition were a literate and somewhat fun bunch,” he said, “but perhaps a little too bored with the faux Civil War generals that I was told once provided protection against cribbing.”
From Washington Post

However, no one had ever informed him that the glitch was a mountweazel.
From Washington Post

Comments

[prettygoodword]

Love this. Mapmakers sometimes do similar things, though not as a general rule placed anyplace where people are likely to be traveling tho'. I can never remember the name for it, though.

[kengr]

Alas, I've encountered several such map "errors" that inconvenienced me. Once a printed map that showed a street connecting to another street when in reality there was a (fenced) cow pasture (requiring a considerable detour rather than the expected short cut. Another was on a map downloaded onto my GPS which showed a street going thru when in reality it was about half a block of street and then a series of drops, hedges and retaining walls which were more than a bit impassable.