{"id":6187,"date":"2011-11-02T12:07:12","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T12:07:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=6187"},"modified":"2011-11-02T12:07:12","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T12:07:12","slug":"mountweazels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=6187","title":{"rendered":"Mountweazels"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/mountweazel.jpg\" width=\"160\" height=\"160\" align=\"right\" style=\"margin:0 0 10px 10px;\" alt=\"Modified mountain weasel\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Today I discovered the wonderful word <strong>mountweazel<\/strong> today while listening to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/iplayer\/episode\/b016lbpt\/The_Museum_of_Curiosity_Series_4_Alex_Horne_Sara_Wheeler_and_Alain_De_Botton\/\">The Museum of Curiosity<\/a> on BBC Radio 4. A <strong>mountweazel<\/strong> is a fake or fictitious entry added to a dictionary, encyclopaedia, map or other reference work as a kind of copyright trap &#8211; if such entries are found in copies, then its clear that they are copies.<\/p>\n<p>The word mountweazel was coined by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/archive\/2005\/08\/29\/050829ta_talk_alford\">The New Yorker<\/a> magazine and comes from a ficititous entry in the New Columbia Encyclopedia (1975 edition) for a Lilian Virginia Mountweazel. Another name for this is nihil article, which first appear in as <em>Nihilartikel<\/em> in the German version of Wikipedia.<\/p>\n<p>On maps fictitious streets and place are inserted as copyright trap. The former are known as &#8220;trap streets&#8221; and the later &#8220;phantom settlements&#8221; or &#8220;paper towns&#8221;. One example is the non-existent town of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Agloe,_New_York\">Agloe<\/a> in New York State.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fictitious_entry\">More information about and examples of mountweazels<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I discovered the wonderful word mountweazel today while listening to The Museum of Curiosity on BBC Radio 4. A mountweazel is a fake or fictitious entry added to a dictionary, encyclopaedia, map or other reference work as a kind of copyright trap &#8211; if such entries are found in copies, then its clear that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}