Introducing the word "anomia" WS said i.a. "...there are words for almost everything under the sun (and beyond)."

I have encountered a need for a word a couple of times lately. The concept resembles "ghost word", for which I recently provided some material to Wikipedia, but it is not identical.

Example: an article author used a word "creosite", which looked like a typo for "creosote", and it had a link (albeit nonfunctional) to "creosite" as well. Now, I am fairly advanced in chemical matters, and I found some thousands of hits in Google for "creosite", but most of them looked unconvincing; after all, other people than that author can also create typos.

It took over an hour's work before I was confident enough to change the Wikipedia entry to "creosote", because it is very difficult to prove a negative; and it is a very serious matter to alter a correct entry to an error, with only one's own ago for justification. In fact, even now I have a strong suspicion that "creosite" might well be an obsolete variant (there are similar obsolete variants for other substances, such as "benzole" for "benzene" etc), or even a particular grade, like the difference between treacle and molasses. I am still woeking in it, and any comments on that point would also be welcome.

Be that as it may, does anyone in forum know of a word for a non-existent word, used in error, looking convincing, (in principle there could easily be such a word as "creosite"; in fact it appears in a book on geology for something totally different (but as far as I can tell, that is a typo for "coesite"!)) but a word that one cannot easily prove to be an error just because it "aint in the dictionary"?

If it were an error that had won its way to its own entry in the dictionary, then it would be a true ghost word, but so far it is just a persuasive error that is hard to distinguish from a rarely used technicalism. What should we call such an utterance? "Phantom word"? "Fatuverb"? "Miragon"? (No emoticon for "stumped"? Or "puzzled"? Sorry!)

Over to anyone...

Jon

Jon