Lillian Virginia Mountweazel

Henry Alford column in the New Yorker

Turn to page 1,850 of the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia and you'll find an entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel, a fountain designer turned photographer who was celebrated for a collection of photographs of rural American mailboxes titled "Flags Up!" Mountweazel, the encyclopedia indicates, was born in Bangs, Ohio, in 1942, only to die "at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine."

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. "It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright," Richard Steins, who was one of the volume's editors, said the other day. "If someone copied Lillian, then we'd know they'd stolen from us."

Alford's column tracks down a made-up word in the New Oxford American Dictionary.

The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster's New Millennium as its source. "It's interesting for us that we can see their methodology," McKean said. "Or lack thereof. It's like tagging and releasing giant turtles."