"If someone copied Lillian, then we'd know they'd stolen from us." (The word is derived from a ghost entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia.) "It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright," Richard Steins, one of the volume's editors, told the New Yorker. The 1975 edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, for example, contained an entry for the word "esquivalience," which was listed as a late 19th century English term for "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities." It was eventually revealed that the word was one of six fake terms inserted by the edition's lexicographers, a term anti-plagiarists call Mountweazels. The idea's existence isn't so dissimilar from the fake entries long employed by the creators of other reference materials. The term "trap street" refers to fake roads and other fictional destinations like Argleton that are intentionally sprinkled on a map to discourage competitors from plagiarism. In this case, either Google was laying the bait for a competitor (hey, Bing?) or the mystery town was inserted in analog form long ago by Tele Atlas, the Netherlands-based company that supplied Google Maps with its initial framework. The more likely story, though, is that Argleton was an example of a copyright trap, which cartographers have long used to catch would-be thieves from stealing their hard work.
#Trap street 2013 software
The town never existed anywhere other than cyberspace, where it was represented visually by one of Google's teardrop-shaped pins.Īt the time, Google said Argleton's inclusion in its mapping software was the result of human error, and the "mistake" was soon deleted.
There were no buildings, street signs, or townspeople - just open fields of untouched grass. If you drove through the English countryside trying to find Argleton, you'd quickly find yourself confused and lost. A cursory online search for the town was replete with websites for businesses, real estate listings, local weather, and even ways to find yourself a hot Friday-night date. As recently as 2009, in the rural English county of Lancashire, a small town called Argleton could easily be found on Google Maps, just east of the A59 motorway.