The start of any new class, whether in high school or university, is marked by a familiar ritual: receiving the syllabus. It’s your roadmap for the semester, a document outlining every topic, deadline, and expectation. We accept the word “syllabus” without a second thought. But what if I told you this cornerstone of academic vocabulary is most likely a phantom? A ghost word, born from a simple typo made over 500 years ago?
The story of ‘syllabus’ is a perfect illustration of how language is not always a product of careful design, but often a result of happy accidents, human error, and the sheer momentum of use. It’s a tale that takes us from the libraries of ancient Rome to the print shops of Renaissance Europe.
A Tale of Two Words: Sittybas vs. Syllabus
Our story begins with the Roman orator and statesman, Cicero. In his letters to his dear friend Atticus, written in the 1st century BCE, Cicero discusses the books he owns. Like many educated Romans of his time, he often wrote in Greek. In one of these letters, he uses the Greek word sittybas (in its accusative plural form, σίττυβας).
So, what was a sittybas? In the ancient world, books were not bound codices like we have today; they were papyrus scrolls. To protect them, scrolls were often kept in cylindrical cases called capsae. To identify a scroll without the cumbersome process of unrolling it, a small strip of parchment or leather was attached to its end. This tag, the sittybas, would hang out of the capsa, displaying the title and author. It was, in essence, a title-slip or a table of contents tag.
For centuries, Cicero’s letters were copied by hand. But everything changed with the invention of the printing press. In a 15th-century printed edition of his letters, a fateful error occurred. The editor or printer, likely unfamiliar with the slightly obscure Greek word sittybas, misread it. The Greek letters for sittybas were transcribed into the Latin alphabet as syllabus.
It’s an easy mistake to imagine. The context—a list of works—made this new, Latin-sounding word seem plausible. And once this typo was set in print, it gained an air of authority that a simple scribal note never could.
The Birth of a “Ghost Word”
The creation of ‘syllabus’ is a classic example of a linguistic phenomenon known as a “ghost word.”
A ghost word is a word that has entered the lexicon and appeared in a dictionary through a misreading or a typographical error, and has no actual etymological origin or history of legitimate use.
These words haunt the pages of our dictionaries, often for decades, before being discovered and exorcised. One of the most famous examples is the word dord. It appeared in the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1934 with the definition “density”. For years, it sat there, unchallenged. It was only revealed to be a ghost in 1947. An investigation found that a slip of paper intended to add the entry “D or d” (as an abbreviation for density) had been misinterpreted by a typesetter as a single word: “dord”.
‘Syllabus’, however, is a ghost word that survived. Unlike ‘dord’, it didn’t just occupy a dictionary entry; it thrived.
Why Did the Mistake Stick?
How does a complete fabrication become a permanent part of the language? The success of ‘syllabus’ boils down to two key factors: repetition and utility.
First, repetition. Once the misprinted version of Cicero’s letters was published, it was read by other scholars. They saw the word ‘syllabus’ used in a classical text by a revered author and assumed it was a legitimate Latin word. They began to use it in their own neo-Latin writings, and the error began to spread. The authority of print culture helped solidify the mistake as fact.
Second, and more importantly, utility. The word ‘syllabus’ filled a genuine need in the language. There wasn’t a perfect, single word in either Latin or English for “a summary of topics in a course or a list of headings in a document”. While words like ‘summary’, ‘outline’, or ‘abstract’ exist, ‘syllabus’ acquired a specific academic and legal connotation that was incredibly useful. It described a concise list, an agenda, a table of contents.
By the mid-17th century, the ghost had fully materialized. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of ‘syllabus’ in English in a 1656 text, where it means “a table of contents or a list of headings of a discourse”. The typo had officially made the leap from a printer’s error to a respectable English noun.
Language Is Human (and Full of Errors)
The journey of ‘syllabus’ is more than just a fun piece of trivia. It’s a powerful reminder that language is a living, breathing, and fundamentally human system. It is not a perfect, logical construct handed down from on high. It’s shaped by us—by our needs, our creativity, and yes, our mistakes.
Before standardized spelling and dictionaries, scribal errors were a major driver of linguistic change. A sleepy monk could miscopy a single letter, and over generations of re-copying, a new word or spelling could be born. Another classic example is the word tweed for the woolen fabric. The original Scottish name was tweel (the local form of twill). A London merchant in the 1830s supposedly misread the handwriting on an order, mistaking “tweel” for “tweed”, likely assuming it was named after the River Tweed. The name was catchy, it stuck, and now we all know the fabric as tweed.
Even in our digital age, this process continues. Think of the word pwned, a staple of early gaming culture. It originated as a simple typo of “owned”, where the ‘o’ and ‘p’ keys are adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard. The typo became a meme, and the meme became a distinct word with its own nuance and flavor.
From a 15th-century printing press to a 21st-century gamer’s keyboard, our errors continue to enrich our language in unexpected ways.
So the next time your professor hands you a syllabus, take a moment to appreciate its bizarre and accidental history. That simple document is a direct linguistic descendant of a tag on an ancient scroll, filtered through a 500-year-old typo. It’s a ghost that became so useful we couldn’t imagine academia without it.