Summary
#e paper focuses on various types of dictionary words, i.e. infrequent and rather uncommon 
words often listed in comprehensive monolingual English dictionaries but virtually nonexistent 
in actual usage. #ese are typically learned derivatives of Greek or Latin origin that are given 
as unlabeled synonyms of everyday vocabulary items. #eir inclusion seems to stem from the 
application of two different bits of lexicographic philosophy: great respect for matters classical 
and the principle of comprehensiveness. Seen from this perspective, descriptive corpus-based 
lexicography is still too weak.
While in large native-speaker-oriented dictionaries of English such entries do not seem to cause 
any harm, they can be positively dangerous in EFL/ESL environments, because using them 
can easily lead to strange or downright incomprehensible lexical items. Learners are advised to 
be careful and check the status of such “dubious” items also in English monolingual learners’ 
dictionaries, in which dictionary words are virtually nonexistent. 
Key words: monolingual dictionary, English, decoding, dictionary word, “dubious” 
word, potential word
 Povzetek
Prispevek obravnava raznovrstne slovarske besede, tj. redke in nenavadne besede, ki jih večji enojezični 
slovarji angleščine pogosto vključujejo kot gesla, v dejanski rabi pa jih skoraj ni. T o so pogosto 
učene klasične izpeljanke; navedene so kot sopomenske alternative vsakdanjih besed, in sicer brez 
kvalifikatorjev. Vključene so zaradi velikega spoštovanja do latinsko-grškega elementa v angleškem 
jeziku, pa tudi zaradi principa izčrpnosti. Pri tovrstnih geslih deskriptivnosti in uporabe korpusov v 
leksikografske namene torej še ni opaziti.
Čeprav v slovarjih za materne govorce angleščine tovrstna gesla najbrž nikomur ne škodijo, pa je v 
okoljih, kjer angleščino poučujejo/rabijo kot tuji jezik, ta praksa lahko nevarna, saj bi lahko marsikaterega 
uporabnika zapeljala v napačno ali vsaj čudno rabo. Pri uporabi večjih enojezičnih slovarjev je zato 
priporočljivo preverjati status “dvomljivih” leksikalnih enot tudi v enojezičnih angleških slovarjih za 
tujce, ki tovrstnega besedišča dosledno ne navajajo.
Ključne besede: enojezični slovar, angleščina, razvezovanje, slovarska beseda, “dvomljiva” beseda, 
potencialna beseda
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.3.1-2.51-62

Words. A fascinating and fitting topic, to me at any rate, especially in a Festschrift for Meta 
Grosman, since it is a topic we have always shared a keen interest in, even if in different contexts. 
For most people, words are there simply to be used at will. #e concept is clear, unproblematic, 
straightforward, useful, even indispensable, and dynamic enough to be recorded in a myriad 
of dictionaries, whether print, CD-ROM, or online. But on looking at them more closely, the 
serene picture of simplicity and clarity may no longer be at its most convincing ...
 Whenever we need to look up a word, most of us turn for help to a good, up-to-date comprehensive 
dictionary, thus demonstrating an awareness of the overall quality deriving from the dictionary’s 
size. In other words, we assume that in assessing a dictionary’s authority, size alone must be 
taken as a key factor. Indeed, it seems logical that the bigger a dictionary the better it is bound 
to be as a reference source, since it both contains more entries and provides more information 
on them than smaller works of reference. However, matters lexicographical are not always so 
straightforward, meaning that the seemingly unassailable “the bigger the better” philosophy need 
not always work, at least not for all purposes.
#is paper focuses on words and dictionaries, specifically monolingual English dictionaries, 
and further on the situation when advanced-level speakers or users of English are in need of 
decoding information, that is, one of understanding a lexical item they encountered in reading 
or listening. In this task, dictionary users routinely consult a comprehensive dictionary. Users 
typically look at words in binary terms, viz. they are perceived as being either simple or difficult 
to understand, and of course it is the latter situation that often calls for dictionary consultation. 
 Virtually all general dictionaries (especially the larger ones) contain various types of entries -  
not only general but technical, scientific, dialectal, slangy, jargon, formal and informal, literary, 
archaic, obsolete, merely old-fashioned, not to mention, on another level, abbreviations and 
acronyms, a variety of phrasal items, encyclopedic terms for people and places, foreign terms, etc.
etc. that have different degrees of relevance for different types of dictionary users. 
For most people, recognizing general and specialized words, and common nouns and proper 
nouns, may well be salient; for them, the linguists’ standard division (e.g. Harley 2006, 117-
19) of lexical items into content words and function words, based on the distinction between 
lexical and grammatical meaning, is not so obvious.  
In this paper, I will briefly discuss a number of remarkable types of words, focusing on several 
categories of rather infrequent, uncommon and/or learned lexical items that get routinely listed in 
many (larger) general monolingual dictionaries of English produced on both sides of the Atlantic, 

notably the major Oxford, Longman, Collins, Chambers; Merriam-Webster, Random House, 
Webster’s New World, and American Heritage educated-native-speaker-oriented productions. 
 Let us first consider a handful of the less-than-common, abstruse, learned and/or borrowed, 
words listed - typically as undefined and unlabeled run-ons - in the bigger monolingual native-
speaker dictionaries of English (say Butterfield ed. 2003, Higgleton and #omson eds. 1998, 
Agnes ed. 1999, Soukhanov and Rooney eds. 1999, Pearsall ed. 1998, Mish ed. 2003, Steinmetz 
ed. 1997, and of course the 20-volume Oxford  English  Dictionary {Simpson and Weiner eds. 
1989} and some of its offspring): acceptableness (cf. acceptability), cooperator (cf. collaborator 
/ co-worker), declaratory, delict, donator (cf. donor), endangerment, etheric (oil),  facultative (cf. 
optional), feuilleton (cf. sketch), garniture (cf. set), geometer (cf. surveyor), graver (cf. engraver), 
incalculably, jalousie, legitimation, nautics, natality, narcomania©, nostrification, pelerine, prosaist, 
radicchio, redaction, and scores of other items that are mere dictionary words, defined as those 
that you find only in a dictionary (Newmark 1991, 147). #ey are rarely – if ever – used but have 
time-honored places in the dictionary. Who, for example, would really use pelerine for cape? Talk 
about conquerableness? Such words – typically learned “latent” derivatives of standard vocabulary 
items – are chiefly artificial creations that serve almost no purpose in the language. Sometimes 
(Read 1978, 96) words are coined for the express purpose of being inserted into a dictionary; the 
status of such opportunistic words, as Read calls them, as viable lexical items is questionable. 
Note that this is not the question of deciding on either of two (or more) synonymous items that 
might make a native speaker think twice before settling on it, as in the case of encyclopedicness 
vs. encyclopedicity or appropriateness vs. appropriacy, or, more formally and with a personal view 
as to the “needless variant,” of averment or averral, or normality and normalcy (Garner 1998, 67, 
445-6, 453). I am rather talking about the formal, learned “potential” words that are virtually 
nonexistent in actual usage. 
It would seem that dictionary words are commoner in those larger monolingual dictionaries which 
were compiled making little use of computer technology, and of corpus analysis in particular; 
thus a recent edition of the Collins English Dictionary (Butterfield ed. 2003) enters among its 
undefined run-ons the derivatives oppositionist and oppositionless; neither of these is to be found 
in the similar-sized (well, even larger) but corpus-based New Oxford (Pearsall ed. 1998). 
Dictionary words also get listed in large bilingual dictionaries designed primarily for decoding 
tasks, that is, for understanding an L2 (=foreign-language) text or translating from an L2 into 
one’s L1 (=first language, typically mother tongue). However, since bilingual dictionaries play a 
role that is considerably different from that of their monolingual counterparts, and are moreover 
still widely regarded as imperfect, flawed, partly outdated, or at least old-fashioned reflections of 
the monolingual tomes, they will be left out of discussion. 
Some words are clearly different while still qualifying as dictionary words. For instance, take the 
general concept of ‘which cannot be eliminated’; it should be expressed by ineliminable. Isn’t 

this just another dictionary word too? Why so? Do dictionaries (and corpora) concur, showing 
largely the same picture?
 
 Anyway, while pondering on such and similar lexical items, I realized that they are more diverse 
than might appear at first sight. T o begin with, dictionary words appear to belong to at least two 
related subcategories. 
(1)   First, there are also dictionary-word morphemes, that is, morphemes that are dubious as 
real language products. For example, the acclaimed monolingual Collins, referred to above, 
lists both the noun catharsis and its irregular plural, catharses. By contrast, the bilingual 
Oxford Hachette (Corréard and Grundy eds. 1994) does not enter any plural form at all. I 
am referring to a bilingual dictionary only to point out that in spite of what many people 
may think about bilingual dictionaries, the better bilingual dictionaries of today might be 
less prone to treat their entries mechanically than their large monolingual counterparts, 
opting instead for a more selective, corpus-based and thus more realistic, selection and 
presentation of their entries. Or consider the entry falsie, ‘either of two pads worn inside 
a bra to make the breasts look larger or more shapely,’ in the Encarta (Soukhanov and 
Rooney eds. 1999), which many other dictionaries list in the plural form only, in this sense 
at any rate. #e dubious singular form seems to reflect the conviction that a canonical noun 
form be listed in the singular, whatever the cost.
(2)  Second, there is the dubious sense, a “somehow suspect” sense of a polysemous lexical 
item. For example, some of the larger English dictionaries (e.g. Collins) define detector also 
as a person doing detecting work, while many others restrict it to mean only a device for 
detecting. Even though corpus evidence suggests that the former sense is dubious, many 
respectable dictionaries keep recording it.
 Quite a few native-speaker dictionaries of English contain many (mostly unlabeled) “dubious” 
words that are not really technical or dialectal or slangy or archaic, not being residues of specialized 
discourse or of an older state of the language (these, of course, are needed for decoding purposes 
in reading specialized or older texts), but rather made up e.g. by applying an existing word-
formation rule, or borrowed  wholesale from a reputable donor (typically Greek or Latin). When 
such items are entered in a dictionary, they seem to reflect two things: One, “the more the better” 
lexicographic policy of entry inclusion/exclusion, particularly if the item under discussion is of 
classsical origin, and two, an acute sense of scholarly comprehensiveness. But do such words, 
which are often derivatives, interpretable, possible words that are not actual words, existing 
as they do in theory rather than in practice (Miller 1991, 108-9), really belong in a (general) 
dictionary? I believe they do not, for the most part, given that their very existence is suspect, so 
that you are not likely to come upon them, which is precisely why you are not likely to need 

information about them. Accordingly, Bailey (1991, 278) observes that “big dictionaries are 
nothing but storerooms with infrequently visited and dusty corners.” On the other hand, in a 
large monolingual dictionary designed expressly for the native speaker, thus chiefly for decoding 
(=elucidation of the meanings of “hard” words or “difficult” senses), such items are defensible, 
on the grounds that ANY conceivable lexical item just might be found in a text, say used by an 
eccentric author, in which case it would of course need to be entered and defined somewhere. By 
contrast, in the context of English as a foreign language, such items may be positively harmful, 
especially for encoding (=either L1-to-L2 translation or writing in L2), because their inclusion 
might tempt the learner to use them in composing in (everyday) English, which could make one’s 
prose, well, unusual, ponderous, outlandish, just slightly odd, or downright incomprehensible. 
“Dubious” or “fringe” lexical items can be found - and quite legitimately at that - in certain 
smaller and specialized wordbooks, often repositories of arcane lexica, that is, idiosyncratic, 
colorful collections – usually compiled by non-linguists – of strange, preposterous, weird and 
wonderful, incredible, obscure, etc.etc. words, but these esoteric volumes too (e.g. Dickson 1982 
and Saussy III 1984) will be left out of discussion. A related and more widely known English 
wordbook, the dictionary of dificult words, however, will not be totally ignored (cf. below). 
 It is not always easy to determine whether a given item qualifies as a dictionary word, even if it is 
not a lengthy, learned Latinate term listed in a large desk dictionary (but hardly anywhere else). 
Take jazzer (or jazzist), guitarist, and bassist, for instance: Are these legitimate, as it were, words, 
existing side by side with jazz musician, guitar player, and bass player? What about boatful? And 
labourist or persiflage, both entered as headwords in the acclaimed Collins (Butterfield ed. 2003)? 
Or consider agendum: Is it a real word? #e Encarta and Collins, for instance, both enter it, while 
the New Oxford does not. #e Oxford English Dictionary has a mere two citations, both fairly 
old, as against as many as 67 for agenda. Next, consider the noun casualization and the related 
verb, to casualize. Both the noun and the verb are entered and defined in the OED (Simpson and 
Weiner eds. 1989), but neither can be found in the New Shorter Oxford (Brown ed. 1993). #e 
New Oxford (Pearsall ed. 1998) defines the noun, listing the verb only as an undefined run-on. 
Neither is listed in most of the other major dictionaries of English. It is not to be found in the 
100-million-word British National Corpus either. Is the verb a likelier candidate for a dictionary 
word? What about the status of the suspiciously-looking adjectives circulative and ensurable? 
Next, is problematics a standard English word or a “European” dictionary word? #e former, 
according to the New Oxford (Pearsall ed. 1998); a nonexistent item, hence the latter, according 
to most other dictionaries. Also, there are “competing derivatives”: Is torpidity a dictionary word, 
given that the Collins (Butterfield ed. 2003) lists it as a mere undefined run-on while treating 
torpor as a headword? #e same applies to the pair ardor (commoner) and ardency (rarer). A 
similar observation can be made about the “real” noun detention vs. the unlikelier detainment, 
routinely entered in most larger dictionaries of English as a run-on s.v. the verb detain, as in the 
Collins or Encarta, or less commonly as a headword but only cross-referred to detention, as in 
the two-volume World Book Dictionary (Barnhart ed. 1996). By contrast, the frequently revised 

bilingual Collins Robert (Duval and Back eds. 1998) lists them side by side, suggesting two more 
or less equivalent competing noun forms. Still on the subject of pairs of learned words - are 
appositive and appositional dictionary words? #e former seems to be commoner, so perhaps the 
latter only should be regarded as the culprit. #e problem can indeed be discussed in terms of 
“clines of acceptability/use,” as in the case of -able adjectives derived from verbs: knowledgeable 
and washable are OK, attributable being slightly less so, while attemptable is clearly less credible 
as a “real” lexical item. Can we draw the lines? Should we?
Or let us consider applier and associator. #ey are, to be sure, only listed, chiefly as run-ons, 
in the larger dictionaries. Are they dictionary words, carrying the stamp of questionableness 
(questionability?) as far as their very existence goes? Not long ago, I realized that sometimes 
a curious situation arises that complicates matters even more: Linguists discuss idiomaticity; 
however, the larger monolingual dictionaries of English  either list idiomaticalness or idiomaticness 
(Barnhart ed. 1996, Butterfield ed. 2003, Soukhanov and Rooney eds. 1999), ignore the item 
altogether (Pearsall ed. 1998), or treat it as an undefined run-on (Random House Webster’s 
Unabridged Dictionary on CD-ROM [Steinmetz ed. 1997] lists idiomaticalness and idiomaticity). 
#e New Shorter Oxford (Brown ed. 1993; CD-ROM 1997) does get the better of all of its 
competitors: It lists and defines - as a subentry - one nominal derivative, idiomaticity. 
Again, why do dictionaries enter such dubious items in the first place? T o enhance their aura of 
authority or to inflate their entry count are probably the likeliest reasons. But this need not be 
as bad as it may sound: Since most of the works in question are comprehensive – containing 
upwards of 150,000 entries – native-speaker-oriented decoding dictionaries, the idea that it will 
do no harm to include as large a word stock as possible cannot really be faulted, even if that 
means including some really outlandish vocabulary items. After all, who can say that this or that 
potential word (Katamba 2005, 74) will NEVER be used, or has never  been used, in any of the 
many millions of texts, written and spoken, short and long, general and specialized, for kids or 
for adults, generated on a daily basis throughout the English-speaking world?
Dictionary words proper can be broken down into 
(1) rare spelling variants, such as independency
(2) words with “suspect” -  well, ghost - senses, such as to wolf, an intransitive verb meaning 
also ‘to hunt wolves’ in the Collins (Butterfield ed. 2003, sense 15 s.v. wolf)
(3) strange-looking, especially obsolete, forms of irregular verbs, such as wrought, rove
(4) derived words such as catchily or censurable, both listed as run-ons (ss.vv. catchy and censure) 
in the not-so-large Concise Oxford (Soanes and Stevenson eds. 2004), for which there 
frequently exist “competing” forms, one of them being typically a dictionary word (e.g. 
gentility vs. the less likely genteelness, found e.g. in the bilingual Oxford Hachette [Corréard 
and Grundy eds. 1994]). 
Sometimes, dictionaries do label such words; Webster’s New World (Agnes ed. 1999) enters the 
adjective longevous, labels it [Rare], and defines it simply as ‘long-lived’. An excellent candidate 
for the status of a dictionary word, subject to confirmation by available corpus evidence!

Not surprisingly, dictionaries show little agreement in their inclusion/exclusion policy and 
treatment of dictionary words. Generally, however, the larger the dictionary the likelier it is to 
include such words.
Interestingly, there are “semantically motivated” dictionary words, where the reason for 
an item being (close to) a dictionary word is at least partly semantic in an extralinguistic 
sense. For example, while the adjectives allowable, accountable, and readable are semantically 
quite useful, the related adverbs allowably, accountably, and readably seem to be much less 
needed in everyday discourse (what is it that we do ALLOWABLY, ACCOUNTABLY, and 
READABLY?). Nevertheless, dictionaries routinely list many derived adverbs as undefined 
run-ons, so that one cannot really be sure about their status: beady eyes, sure; but what about 
to look beadily (at someone)?  More generally, adverbs often seem to be less commonly used, 
and in fewer senses at that, than the adjectives they are formed from. #is may well be the 
why they are typically given short shrift - in stark contrast to adjectives they are derived from 
- in many English monolingual dictionaries. However, problems are not restricted to adverbs. 
Take, for example, verbs derived from nouns indicating fields of study: archeology, ethnology, 
linguistics, astronomy, etc. - do we archeologize, ethnologize, linguisticize, or astronomize? #e 
first seems acceptable, the second is suspect, while the third and the fourth sound more like a 
joke. Why so? Corpora are not much help here; these are rare words, and there are thousands 
of rare words that no corpus - however large - can be expected to contain, not even a single 
occurrence.
#e concept of dictionary word can be extended to items that were once actually used but later 
fell into disuse. Such items are different from “hardcore” dictionary words, because they must 
be available in the larger dictionaries to help language users decode older texts. Moreover, 
they may be indicative of the dynamic nature of language: Newmark (2000, 191) thus notes 
that the Latin phrase obiter dicta, meaning ‘things said in passing,’ often misused “like many 
words that one hears but never looks up,” appears to have fallen out of use, though it was not 
uncommon in an English intellectual’s vocabulary fifty years ago, so that by the end of the 20
th
 
century it has become “merely a ‘dictionary word’” (ibid.).
Aside from Newmark suggesting the label dictionary word for such items, linguists and 
lexicographers have come up with a number of related terms to better capture the varied world 
of lexical phenomena. 
 #e concept of dictionary word may be said to include, or be flanked by,  a number of (sub)types 
of less-than-everyday lexical items. 
► First, there is the interesting ghost word, the best-known of the lot, also known as ghost 
form (Crystal 1999, 135; Cuddon 1999, 352), as phantom word (Cuddon 1999, 663), or even 
as vox nihili (Grambs 1984, 150). It is a word that never really existed but was coined due to the 

blunders (including spurious readings) of printers or scribes and editors, and was in many cases 
inadvertently carried over from one dictionary into another. A famous example of a ghost word 
in English is Dord, listed as a synonym of density in Webster’s Second International Dictionary of 
1934; the error arose from an editor misinterpreting D or d, used to show that the item density 
could be abbreviated using either a capital D or a lowercase d, as though it were a real English 
word of its own (McArthur ed. 1992: 440).  
#e term is to be found in the literature (cf. e.g. Read 1978, 95; Cuddon 1999, 352; Howard 
1985; and Iannucci 1986). Unlike dictionary word, it is entered in several large dictionaries of 
English; the New Oxford (Pearsall ed. 1998, 771), for instance, says it is ‘a word recorded in a 
dictionary or other reference work which is not actually used,’ thus making it more general, 
if we ignore the fact that the absence of a comma after work makes the definition ambiguous 
(is it the word or the reference work that is not actually used?). #e Collins (Butterfield ed. 
2003, 685) fares much better in this respect: ghost word is ‘a word that has entered the language 
through the perpetuation, in dictionaries, etc., of an error’, and so does the Random House 
(Steinmetz ed. 1997), which defines it as ‘a word that has come into existence by  error rather 
than by normal linguistic transmission, as through the mistaken reading of a manuscript, a 
scribal error, or a misprint,’ giving [1885-90] as the estimate of the time the phrase entered 
the (written) language. 
Howard (1985, 80-82) mentions several famous “ghosts,” including dord,  foop/foup(e), 
phantomnation, howl (‘a Scottish spelling of hovel’), and momblishness, observing that there are in 
addition some other words that “do not sound healthy”; rather than being ghosts, however, these 
words are merely superannuated, that is, ‘old and no longer useful or no longer able to do things’ 
(Summers ed. 2005). Furthermore, there are poltergeist words, or those which ‘change their 
meanings through misapprehension’ (Howard 1985, 83), such as scarifying, used as a colloquial 
synonym for scaring, while its former meaning was ‘covering with scratches or scars.’
 
► Next in line, there is the humbler hothouse word, a term referring to a learned word that 
has never been used, so far as anyone can find; the older dictionaries contain many such words, 
e. g. decircinate, ‘to bring out of compass,’ listed in #omas Blount’s Glossographia (1656). 
Such items can be regarded as individualisms. Some of the hothouse words  were probably also 
ghost words, i.e. those that never existed “but have dragged out a ghostly existence down through 
the years merely because some early lexicographer like #omas Blount saw fit to include them in 
his dictionary” (Read 1978, 96). 
► Further down the road, the latent word, a term suggested by Malkiel (1962, 9) for a 
word  - mostly a derivative - that was created deliberately and entered into dictionaries by 
lexicographers according to the existing patterns of word formation, so that it is readily 
understandable and gives the appearance of authenticity, even though for such words “no 
record exists to prove that they have ever been used” (Landau 2001, 102; Svensén 1993, 
41), because “speakers have not bothered to activate on the same scale all the grammatical 
potentialities” (Malkiel 1962, 9). 

► #e spurious word is a word that is erroneous, false, or one that cannot be authenticated 
(Berg 1993, 175). #e large historical dictionaries record such items out of the need to enter and 
define whatever appears to be a lexical item, even if it can only be found in remote, outdated, or 
otherwise uncommon sources.
► Not to be forgotten, we can come across the nonce (word), i.e. a word created for a particular 
occasion or publication and thus usually short-lived. #e concept is listed in dictionaries of 
linguistic terms such as Crystal (2003) and discussed by Steinmetz and Kipfer (2006, Chapter 
27). Such an item is coined by a native speaker who, feeling at home with the formative practices 
of the language, creates a “makeshift or convenient term, such as one invented by a novelist for 
a special usage or meaning” (Grambs 1984, 245). Katamba (2005, 74) defines nonce words as 
“words expressly coined for the first time and apparently used once.” 
► Next, the nonwords, or “words that aren’t really words” (Garner 1998, 451-2), that is, 
meaningless words not recognized or accepted as legitimate (Steinmetz and Kipfer 2006, 227), 
such as analyzation (“a pseudo-learned variant of analysis” [Garner 1998, 39]), annoyment (“worse 
than a needless variant” of annoyance [ibid., p. 43]), and seldomly (“nonword” that is “never ... 
needed. It isn’t even listed in most dictionaries” [ibid., p. 587]). While all these items have in 
fact been used by some native speakers, they are widely regarded as incorrect and/or unnecessary, 
which is why they often get listed - and criticized - in usage guides. Garner (1998, 451) notes 
that nonwords were discussed at least as early as 1899. A caveat, though: #e term nonword may 
mean different things to different people: "e New Oxford (Pearsall ed. 1998, 1262) defines non-
word [sic] as ‘a group of letters or speech sounds that looks or sounds like a word but that is not 
accepted as such by native speakers.’ 
► #ere are also the related nonsense words, i.e. words that may have little - if any - meaning 
but were coined to create a particular effect (Steinmetz and Kipfer 2006, Chapter 28).
► Another relevant term, individualism (Read 1978), refers to a word coined to fulfill the need 
of a particular speaker. #e avant-garde writers like James Joyce and Jack Kerouac provide many 
examples. 
► A stern technical term known cheifly to language specialists, hapax  legomenon indicates 
a word found in classical texts in only one instance. #e term can be applied more narrowly in 
word-formation; thus Aronoff (1976, 10) defines hapax legomena as ‘morphemes which only 
occur in one English word,’ such as the prototypical #cran# in cranberry, whence originates the 
alternative appellation, cranberry morphs.
► More broadly, Read (1978, 95) suggests a catchall term, evanescent words, those which are 
commonly regarded as not being ‘part of the language.’

Formerly, many strange-looking learned words, known as hard words and inkhorn terms/
words, were commonly listed and defined, particularly in the 17
th
-century monolingual English 
dictionaries, when the “hard-word” tradition was the order of the day (Hartmann and James 
1998, 67, 75). Cuddon (1999, 420) defines them as “pedantic terms and learned borrowings 
from foreign tongues.” Such terms are still present in the large dictionaries of English, for instance 
the awesome-looking aurantiaceous in the World Book Dictionary (Barnhart ed. 1996). Such 
outlandish items are entered in some usage dictionaries as sesquipedalian words. Garner (1998, 
590-3) discusses them in his entry on sesquipedality, or “the use of big words.” 
T oday, wordsmiths (cf. Lederer 1990, 155-9) are acutely aware of a number of other types of 
words, such as alphabet words, letter words, palindromic words, pronoun words, pyramid 
words, snowball words, isograms (the last-named being words in which no letter of the 
alphabet appears more than once, e.g. uncopyrightable). And there is the -nym army: not only 
synonyms, homonyms, meronyms, pseudonyms and antonyms but eponyms, contronyms 
(or antagonyms)
1
, heteronyms, retronyms – and a whole lot more (ibid., pp. 56-64, 65-84). 
Further, a glance at the Wikipedia can let you in on yet another category, power words, i.e. those 
words (or phrases) which are “used to make one’s statement stronger” (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Power_word). Evidently, words can be – well, more than words can say. Moreover, there are 
quite a few types of words that have no special appellations, such as all-vowel words and one-letter 
words, witness “Strange & Unusual Dictionaries,” a delightful website (http://www.oneletterwords.
com/). And there’s more, for instance items known as mondegreens, or words misheard in songs 
(Safire 1980, 166-72), a class of items that still awaits lexicographical recognition.
A related and rather more general but elusive term, difficult word, will not be discussed in this 
paper, even though the concept behind it is intriguing. It has received its share of lexicographical 
attention in English dictionaries of, well, difficult words (edited e.g. by Laurence Urdang [1993] 
and by John Ayto [1994], an earlier version of the latter work being currently available on the 
Internet from http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/difficultwords/). Most dictionaries 
of difficult words have been designed for native speakers, to help them with “obscure, exotic, 
complex, misunderstood and misused words” (Urdang 1993, front cover). #ey are based on the 
assumption that native speakers of English are not likely to look up items such as yes, but, father, 
nice, sure, to get, but rather the likes of intrados, intrant, intravasation, introgression, introjection, and 
intussusception, all listed as headwords in the Chambers (Higgleton and #omson eds. 1998) - so 
why bother to list the former at all? #e trouble lies at the heart of the concept: What is it that 
makes a word difficult, and who is it difficult to? 
 As Landau (1984, 78) points out, a number of dubious items listed in the college dictionaries, 
e.g. sluggardliness, oppressingly, and idioticalness, all of which appear in the Collins, may never 


have been used. College dictionaries include them (as rare run-on derivatives) in an effort to 
inflate their entry count. In a monolingual context, this practice does not really contribute 
to confusion or misunderstanding. By contrast, in a  bilingual one, it often does, as when 
a Slovenian college student of English decided to use facultative instead of optional on the 
seemingly unassailable grounds that it is treated as its synonym (sense 1b: ) in 
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate
®
 (Mish ed. 2003) without any restrictive label whatsoever! #is 
implies that in the EFL context, the danger associated with dictionary words is likely to be 
lurking in encoding tasks, that is, in L1-to-L2-type translation or in producing L2 text. In 
such cases, the EFL student is advised to consider the possibility of a two-stage dictionary 
lookup process - to go from the large monolingual native-speaker-oriented tome to a good 
monolingual learners’ dictionary, where dictionary words are virtually nonexistent.
#e continued presence of dictionary words in the larger monolingual dictionaries of English 
even today implies that dictionary revisions chiefly concentrate on additions rather than 
deletions, so that a lot of deadwood remains recorded, the logic probably being that such 
items are not likely to do any harm. As long as they once really existed in the language, one 
should not complain. But dictionary words that never existed in English - well, that’s another 
story, especially in the context of EFL. Moreover, in the age of corpus-based lexicography, the 
machines do not throw up nonexistent items! Yet most larger reputable dictionaries of English 
still contain them. Go figure . . .