QUESTION: What are ghost words?
ANSWER: According to Grammarly, ghost words are non-existent words that have no meanings. These words only exist because of printing errors committed in the process of manufacturing dictionaries.
According to Grammarly, an example of a ghost word is “dord”; a word that erroneously “appeared in the dictionary for eight years in the mid-20th century.”
QUESTION: How many words did Shakespeare Invent?
ANSWER: According to the website Shakespeare Online, Shakespeare invented over 1,700 words.
Some of the words he coined are: swagger, academe, barefaced, compromise, frugal, skim milk, gust, impartial, blushing, courtship, eyeball, obsequiously, moonbeam, mountaineer, marketable, gloomy, equivocal, elbow, cold-blooded, buzzer, excitement, lackluster, radiance, fixture, circumstantial, hobnob, majestic, champion, birthplace, zany, gossip, bandit, luggage, blanket.
QUESTION: How Often Are New Words Added To The Dictionary?
ANSWER: According to Grammarly, a new word is added into the dictionary every two hours. The grammar source states that, “During the course of the year, almost 4,000 new words are added.”
WOW! How’s that for dictionary building? Who can keep up with that?
QUESTION: What English word has the most definitions.
ANSWER: Set. According to the Guinness World Records, the word “set” has 430 different meanings. Guinness World Records also states this concerning the word “set”: “The word commands the longest entry in the dictionary at 60,000 words, or 326,000 characters.”
