adj. arousing or deserving of ridicule : extremely silly or unreasonable
"There was no intent to mislead, confabulate or even bamboozle. It was an innocent enough coinage."
— Ian Hislop
Many words and phrases are coined every day, in divers manner. Think of the word covfefe, an unfortunate utterance in a moment of weakness by one whose verbal reach did not exceed his grasp. That one has thus far failed to reach farther than the Urban Dictionary. Others have reached the dictionary, many in an odd fashion. Consider scofflaw, a word devised for and winning, a competition for a new word to define those who broke US Prohibition Laws.
This particular word ridonkulous reached up from an even more unusual source to grace the pages of the OED, a venerable tome and institution said to be the "principal historical dictionary of the English language". Containing definitions, usage and etymologies for over 600,000 words, the editors are continually scanning English as she is spoke worldwide and deciding which words will be included in the corpus.
The Jest
The year was 2005, and with the development of new technologies and the rise of social media, the powers that be at OED decided that they needed to crowdsource their efforts. To that end, they launched a program known as Wordhunt and invited the public to submit "citations for 50 selected recent words. The results were reported in a BBC TV series, Balderdash and Piffle"¹.
Enter the satirist and broadcaster Ian Hislop, who is also editor of the Private Eye magazine. With a ready wit, he convinced several prominent journalists to conspire to introduce the nonce word ridonculous into the fray. In a move that Brass Eye's creator Chris Morris described as "preposterous", Hislop persuaded many leading figures (including a leading bishop and two MPs) to contact the OED to put the word forward for consideration. This of itself would not be enough to convince the highly-educated and academic folks engaged in the Wordhunt project to include the word, and but for a genius stroke by a Google employee, would have gone down in history as an elaborate and cunning failed jape.
Google had decided to digitise a vast number of books in 2002, and the process was already well under way in 2005. We do not know the names of the folks at the Google Print Library Project (later known as Google Books) who enabled the prank to go the Full Monty, but through an elaborate and crafty series of inventions (and possibly, hacks) they introduced a number of volumes "from various worldwide libraries" which did in fact contain the word. Of course, English being what it is, in addition to Hislop's spelling there were a variety of styles, ridunculous and ridonculosity to mention but two. By the end, and in the true spirit of Noah Webster they introduced an improved form (to which they gave first place in their faked documents), which is the spelling most commonly used today.
The Publication
The faked historical documents, coupled with the insistence of Hislop's group, was enough to convince the editors at the Dictionary, and they decided to include the word, and it was published in the online dictionary in 2006. Of course the rest of the world, notably the impressive Merriam-Webster Chief Editor, were quick to point out that in fact the OED had been duped. Academics worldwide climbed on the bandwagon to point and laugh at the world's foremost English Language ambassador. Wordsmith Boris Johnson said in an interview at the BBC that "Oxford has been done up like a kipper", as indeed they had.
Sad to say, the word never actually made it into a printed dictionary; since 2000 it had been pretty much clear that there could never be another print run, and that the dictionary and its updates would only be available online. After all, the printed Second Edition ran to twenty volumes, and the Third is the masterpiece we see online today, so there is sadly no trace of the joke's aftermath other than the whispers that form this story.
¹
Wikipedia article on the OED
Even though much of this writeup is in fact true, it nonetheless is written for LieQuest 2022.