"apophenia"

[Laurence Horn]

Not in either the OED or AHD4, nor in Merriam-Webster online.  It
turned up in a book review in today's Times, and there are seven
other hits on Nexis going back to 2003, but there are, count 'em,
410,000 google hits, and Wikipedia ("We're virtually as accurate as
the Britannica!") defines it as "the experience of seeing patterns or
connections in random or meaningless data", attributing the coinage
(as do other sites) to Klaus Conrad in 1958.  It strikes me as a
useful word, wherever it came from, and at some point, it might
deserve an entry (maybe even before vagitarian)...

LH

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