Today I learned (TIL as the cool kids would say?):
Dictionary people are really scared that some other guys will steal all their beautiful work and put fake words in there, that they come up with. Those fictitious entries are called trap words or also mountweazels.
Now this seems fairly weird for a book that is supposed to be a bit of a weird thing to do for a piece of media that has a certain “aura“ of being authoritative and correct.
After reading about that, I followed a few links and also learned:
While these are there as tripwires for copyright infringement actually you cannot infringe[ in the US], because fictitious places are not protectable by copyright law.
So while the copyright trip-wire-bell starts ringing when someone walks into it. There is no way to actually enforce any copyright on those specific items. Even though, those are actually the ones with the most creative work actually flowing into them…