Henry Alford reports in a New Yorker piece from last August about an unnamed investigator’s search for a proverbial needle in the haystack — the single falsified word in the most recent edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

To discourage (and uncover) plagiarizers of reference books, editors occasionally include false entries. Armed with a rumour and a battery of reference materials, the investigator narrowed the field to a list of six potentially made-up words, which he then handed off to lexicographical experts. Through the amusing application of etymological and pronunciation rules, the majority identified a single culprit, which was then confirmed by the NOAD‘s editor-in-chief, Erin McKean: esquivalience, which is said to denote “the willful avoidance of one’s official responsibilities.”

The practice of adding false words to dictionaries raises a series of questions. What effect will the inclusion of bogus words have on the perceived authority of dictionaries? Could the practice lead to instant additions to our lexicon? How many word thieves will be caught? This much is certain, according to Alford: “The word has since been spotted on Dictionary.com, which cites Webster’s New Millennium as its source.”

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Click here for Alford’s piece in The New Yorker