Ghost words
We all love butter chicken, but what would it be without its grany!
Oh, grany is not a typo, but the word gravy is.
The word gravy exists because someone miswrote grany as gravy, and now we have gravy on our butter chicken.
Gravy, like many other words we commonly use in English is a Ghost word.
Ghost words are words that made their way into the English dictionary because they were either misread, misprinted, or were typographical errors!
While some ghost words become a part of our parlance, some are removed from the dictionary soon after.
Other ghost words include common words such as Tweed (originally tweel), and syllabus, a typo of the Greek word sittybos -- a leather parchment label that gave the title and the contents of a document.
Interesting, isn't it? Can you name other such Ghost words?