As Leopold Bloom saunters down Molesworth Street watching the blind stripling he has just helped cross the intersection, he thinks: “Wonder would he feel it if something was removed. Feel a gap.”
Fictitious entries, also known as fake entries, Mountweazels, and Nihilartikels, are deliberately incorrect entries or articles in reference works such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, maps and directories. Entries in reference works normally originate from a reliable external source, but no such source exists for a fictitious entry.
The neologism Mountweazel was coined by the The New Yorker magazine based on a fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 edition of the New Columbia Encyclopedia. Another term, Nihilartikel, is of uncertain origin, combining the Latin word nihil, “nothing” with German Artikel, “article.” There is also the specific term “trap street.”
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A trap street is a fictitious street included on a map, often outside the area the map covers, for the purpose of “trapping” potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the “trap street” on their map.
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The town of Agloe, New York was invented by map makers but eventually became a real place.
