Dr. Erica Brozovsky of the PBS series Otherwords explained how certain words accidentally made their way into the dictionary due to typos, misspellings or messy handwriting. These words are known as “ghost words”.
Ghost words are words that accidentally made their way into the dictionary without having a real usage or meaning. Generally, they come to be because of typographical errors or maybe misreading illegible handwriting.
Examples of these ghost words include gravy and syllabus.
For instance, the word gravy is thought to be a 14th century cookbook misreading which turned the old French grané into gravé. … Like gravy, syllabus is now a legitimate word. But according to the second edition of the Oxford English dictionary,it originated from a misreading of the Greek word sittubas, meaning parchment label or book title slip. If you’ve ever tried to read someone’s messy handwriting, you can forgive that mistake
