Why this word is great
MOUNTWEAZEL — [Noun] A fictitious entry deliberately inserted in a reference work to detect plagiarism or unauthorized copying. Coined by Henry Alford in *The New Yorker* (2005), derived from the fabricated entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel—a fictional fountain designer and photographer of rural mailboxes—in the 1975 *New Columbia Encyclopedia*. Unlike "trap street" (a cartographic decoy) or "nihilartikel" (a generic false entry), a mountweazel is a named phantom, a sleeper agent lying in wait among the facts. It is the biographical footnote for a woman who never was, the phantom species listed in a field guide, the invented chemical compound lurking in a textbook’s appendix—a quiet testament to the fact that even truth’s guardians must sometimes traffic in lies.