Keyword: «dictionaries of the english language»

This article examines the history of the development of the English language, where the term “ghost-words” is found, introduced by the British philologist and Professor W. W. Skeet in the second half of the XIX century. This term was introduced to define words that never existed in the language, but got into linguistic dictionaries for various reasons. This study will discuss how “ghost-words” appeared, how they influenced the language, what has become of them in our time and what function they perform.