Dickens Quarterly

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.