One of my favorite words is nonword, which is funny because any word about which someone asks, Is that a word?, is almost certainly a word. As I mentioned in this column a couple of years ago, we sometimes hear people say that irregardless isn’t a word. But of course it is. So are preventative (alongside preventive), inclimate (when inclement is intended), seldomly (alongside the adverb seldom), and unmercilessly (alongside mercilessly and unmercifully).
In fact, they’re a special type of word: They’re nonwords, which are words having no legitimate existence. That’s old hat to readers of this column. So let’s now consider two subtypes of nonwords: ghost-words and mountweazels. These are peculiar to dictionaries. Oh, and there’s a third subtype: the hapax legomenon, which isn’t restricted to dictionaries.
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