Kangaroo word a word that contains its antonym; for example: "covert" carries "overt", "animosity" carries "amity". Some compilers require that the letters of the joey word not be consecutive within the kangaroo word, or that the kangaroo and joey words must be etymologically unrelated. Kangaroo words were originally popularized as a word game by Ben O'Dell in an article for "The American Magazine", volume 151, during the 1950s. This was later reprinted in "the Reader's Digest". Kangaroo word A kangaroo word is a word that contains letters of another word, in order, with the same meaning. For example: the word "masculine" contains
Ghost word word" refers to coining a new word implied logically from a real word, often etymologically incorrectly. The correct term for such a derivation is back-formation, a word that has been established since the late 19th century. An example is "beforemath" which is derived from "aftermath". A back-formation cannot become a ghost word; as a rule it would clash with Skeat's precise definition, which requires that the word forms have "no meaning". Ghost words and similar errors and creations, certainly including back-formations, usually are at least troublesome to philologists as a source of neologisms and linguistic confusion. More philosophically, one might