Ghost words may not be technically real, and the London Philological Society may have zealously worked to catch and remove them from lists and dictionaries, but that hasn’t stopped some of them from gaining a certain amount of currency. “Abacot” may have been such a ghost word; the man who took it off the list apparently felt the need to defend himself (per Walter William Skeat’s address to the Society in 1886). Skeat also cited “kime” as an example in his address. “Kime” won some notoriety when it appeared in a notable publication, the Edinburgh Review, in an 1808 article by Sydney Smith. Writing about presumed customs within Hinduism, Smith claimed that “some [Hindus] run kimes through their hands.” A critic of the critic extrapolated from the context some diabolic instrument of torture, but “kime” was just a misprint of the word “knife,” as Smith explained in a subsequent edition.

A less dramatic example of a ghost word is “dord.” Between 1934 and 1947 (per Merriam-Webster), this word appeared between “Dorcopsis” and “doré,” per Smithsonian, and was defined as a synonym of density used by physicists and chemists. But in 1939, an editor of the dictionary got suspicious and did a little digging. He found no examples of “dord” ever being used. The ghost word was traced to a 1931 paper that indicated upper and lower-case Ds could be used to abbreviate density: “D or d.” Someone mashed the note into a new word.