"Mountweazel" meaning in English

See Mountweazel in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: Mountweazels [plural]
Etymology: Coined by Henry Alford in the The New Yorker from an entry for a fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Head templates: {{en-noun}} Mountweazel (plural Mountweazels)
  1. A nihilartikel. Wikipedia link: New Columbia Encyclopedia, The New Yorker Synonyms: mountweazel Hypernyms: copyright trap

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for Mountweazel meaning in English (2.6kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "Coined by Henry Alford in the The New Yorker from an entry for a fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "Mountweazels",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "Mountweazel (plural Mountweazels)",
      "name": "en-noun"
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  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
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          "kind": "other",
          "name": "Undetermined quotations with omitted translation",
          "parents": [
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            "Entry maintenance"
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      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2018 December 31, Nick Norlen, “‘Glitch of the Pentagon’: There’s a reason you might not have heard of this monster”, in Washington Post, →ISSN",
          "text": "Tweedy-Holmes is now a professional photographer, and portions of her website bio read a bit like a mountweazel: “Her images of the male nude were exhibited extensively to critical acclaim in the 1970s and are among the first art photographs of this subject by an American woman.”",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2020, Eley Williams, The Liar's Dictionary, Anchor",
          "text": "“I need to talk to you about mountweazels.”\n“Mountweazels,” I repeated.\n“There are mistakes. In the dictionary,” David said. […] He assumed a defensive tone. “Well. Not mistakes. Not-quite mistakes. They're words that are meant to be there but not meant to be there.”",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2021, Rochelle Lieber, Introducing Morphology, third edition, Cambridge University Press, page 32",
          "text": "Lest you think that lexicographers are humorless […], let's consider the issues of mountweazels mentioned briefly above. As Henry Alford reveals in the August 29, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001) planted the non-existent word esquivalience […] among the entries for the letter “e” to catch potential dictionary pirates.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A nihilartikel."
      ],
      "hypernyms": [
        {
          "word": "copyright trap"
        }
      ],
      "id": "en-Mountweazel-en-noun-aTTbIXtJ",
      "links": [
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      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "mountweazel"
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      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "New Columbia Encyclopedia",
        "The New Yorker"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "Mountweazel"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "Coined by Henry Alford in the The New Yorker from an entry for a fictitious Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "Mountweazels",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "Mountweazel (plural Mountweazels)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "hypernyms": [
    {
      "word": "copyright trap"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
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        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
        "English eponyms",
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        "English nouns",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Undetermined quotations with omitted translation",
        "Undetermined terms with quotations"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2018 December 31, Nick Norlen, “‘Glitch of the Pentagon’: There’s a reason you might not have heard of this monster”, in Washington Post, →ISSN",
          "text": "Tweedy-Holmes is now a professional photographer, and portions of her website bio read a bit like a mountweazel: “Her images of the male nude were exhibited extensively to critical acclaim in the 1970s and are among the first art photographs of this subject by an American woman.”",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2020, Eley Williams, The Liar's Dictionary, Anchor",
          "text": "“I need to talk to you about mountweazels.”\n“Mountweazels,” I repeated.\n“There are mistakes. In the dictionary,” David said. […] He assumed a defensive tone. “Well. Not mistakes. Not-quite mistakes. They're words that are meant to be there but not meant to be there.”",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2021, Rochelle Lieber, Introducing Morphology, third edition, Cambridge University Press, page 32",
          "text": "Lest you think that lexicographers are humorless […], let's consider the issues of mountweazels mentioned briefly above. As Henry Alford reveals in the August 29, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary (2001) planted the non-existent word esquivalience […] among the entries for the letter “e” to catch potential dictionary pirates.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A nihilartikel."
      ],
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        "New Columbia Encyclopedia",
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      ]
    }
  ],
  "synonyms": [
    {
      "word": "mountweazel"
    }
  ],
  "word": "Mountweazel"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-15 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (8203a16 and 304864d). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

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