Further, sometimes we find items in dictionaries that we might hesitate to call words – even if they do occur in the dictionary. Among these items are words that are labeled as ‘nonce’, meaning that they’ve been found just once, often in the writing of someone important, but that nevertheless  don’t seem to occur anywhere else. The OED On-line, for example, lists as a nonce the word agreemony, which they define as ‘agreeableness’, and illustrate with a single quotation from the seventeenth-century writer Aphra Behn. Was this ever really a word? Indeed, the OED even lists some words that occur only once, and further, in contexts which don’t illuminate their meaning; for example, we can find the word umbershoot used by James Joyce in Ulysses, about which the OED maddeningly says only “meaning obscure”! Words or not?

Very extensive dictionaries like the OED sometimes also contain words that they identify as mistakes. For example, we can find an entry for the word ambassady, which occurs in a single quotation from 1693 and is, according to the OED, perhaps a mistake, where the author might have meant the word ambassade “the mission or function of an ambassador.” It occurs in the dictionary, but is it really a word?

And finally, there are what have come to be called ‘mountweazels’. A mountweazel is a phony word that is inserted into a dictionary so that its makers can identify lexicographic piracy. lexicographers sometimes make up an entry and include it so that they can tell if another lexicographer is using their dictionary as a source without attribution (which is plagiarism, of course). Surely we wouldn’t want to count such impostors as real words, but they’re in the dictionary!