Abstract:Whereas ghost words in the world's languages have not infrequently been reported in the research literature, ghost meanings have less often caught the attention of students of language. Two ghost meanings of the English plural theatricals are *"stage properties" (which made its first appearance in a fascicle of The Oxford English Dictionary ready for the printer in March 1912) and *"theater memorabilia" (which made its first appearance in the first printing of Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language: Unabridged, published in 1961). Both are based on misreadings of a letter written by Charles Dickens on 19 June 1855 and have not been corrected in any of the editions or printings, including the latest ones, of those dictionaries. The present article reconstructs how the two ghost meanings arose.

中文翻译：

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字典创造的鬼义：狄更斯使用戏剧一词的案例

摘要：虽然世界语言中的幽灵词在研究文献中并不少见，但幽灵意义很少引起语言学生的注意。英语复数 theatricals 的两个幽灵含义是 *“stage properties”（首次出现在 1912 年 3 月准备印刷的《牛津英语词典》分册中）和 *“theater memorabilia”（首次出现在韦伯斯特第三版新国际英语词典的首次印刷：未删节，1961 年出版）。两者都是基于对查尔斯·狄更斯于 1855 年 6 月 19 日写的一封信的误读，并没有在这些词典的任何版本或印刷品（包括最新版）中进行更正。