Mountweazels, Paper Towns and Copycat Traps

The same family of ideas appears under other names. In German, a fake encyclopedia entry may be called a Nihilartikel, literally a “nothing article.” In dictionaries, invented words are sometimes called ghost words or trap words. The most famous case is esquivalience, a word the New Oxford American Dictionary defined as “the wilful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities” (which is hilarious in context). It was invented for the dictionary’s first edition by editor Christine Lindberg, complete with a fabricated etymology tracing it to French. For years nobody noticed. Then, in 2005, a New Yorker journalist went hunting through the dictionary’s more obscure entries and, with the help of several lexicographers, zeroed in on the word as a likely fake. Editor-in-chief Erin McKean confirmed it, and also said the trap had already caught something: “esquivalience” had turned up, uncredited, on Dictionary.com.

The same principle appears outside books and maps, too. A canary trap is when you give slightly different versions of a document to different people, so that if one version leaks, the source can be identified (in spy circles this is also sometimes called a barium meal test). In cybersecurity, honeypots are decoy systems or files designed to attract intruders, while honeytokens are fake-but-trackable pieces of data – like dummy credentials, email addresses or documents – that trigger an alert when used. Email marketers and anti-spam teams also use spamtraps: addresses that look real but are not used by real people, so mail sent to them can reveal harvesting, scraping or poor list hygiene. Different fields, same basic trick.