Grammar Girl here. I'm In Jan Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, in honor of Halloween, we're going to talk about ghostly words and phrases. And then we'll look at the difference between the words between and among.

I started thinking about ghost phrases for Halloween, and I was surprised how many of them there are.

I thought of a lot myself, and then when I started searching, I found even more, and I love some of the stories.

Let's start with my favorite, ghost words.

These are dictionary entries created entirely by mistake.

Back in 2019, I did a whole episode about them. That's episode 734, if you want the full story.

But here's a quick example. The word doored appeared in Webster's new International Dictionary for years, defined as density.

But Doord isn't a real word at all. It was supposed to be an abbreviation entry for density that read D or D, capital D or lowercase D. But someone who worked on the entry misread it as a word

spelled D-O-R-D, and thus D-O-R-D was born. This was in 34. A sharp-eyed editor discovered the error

in 1939, and a correction note was sent to the printer,

but Doard wasn't completely exercised until 1947.

But let's move on to some more common ghost phrases.

When your car finally gives up the ghost, you're using a phrase that works for both death and broken machines.

If you look white as a ghost or like you've seen a ghost, you're visibly shaken or pale.

And if something doesn't have a ghost of a chance, well, it has virtually no chance at all.

And if the detective's boss and your favorite police procedural tells the

star to stop chasing ghosts, the boss thinks your hero is wasting time, chasing something that

doesn't exist. But we all know from experience that the detective will be vindicated in the end.

A ghost town is a place that's been deserted. It could be a

literal town, but you can also use the phrase metaphorically, like, wow, it was a ghost town at the

mall this afternoon. And of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention one of my favorite recent

family acts in which Sherry from Florida

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