spriest
I was reading a fantasy novel, and came across a reference to the spriest doing something, and spent a little time being confused. It’s like priest, but with an s at the beginning! I thought to myself. Is that some kind of fantasy-world religious term? Instead of priests, they have spriests? But I did a search through the ebook, and that was the only place the word appeared.
So then I came up with a new theory: This must be a search-and-replace error, like the classic dawizard. (Wow, apparently I’ve never posted about that here? In 1994, an editor on a D&D manual did a replace-all to change mage to wizard, not realizing that that would also turn damage into dawizard.) So I spent a few minutes trying to guess what synonym for priest had been replaced, leading to a nonsense word.
But I couldn’t figure it out. So I did a web search—
—and realized that (as you may well have already noticed) spriest is a perfectly ordinary English word that has nothing to do with priests. It’s the superlative of the word spry.