Orbisculation Nation

Their dad invented the perfect word. After he died, they started a quest to get it into the dictionary.

- Sadie Dingfelder

IN THE EARLY AUGHTS, Hilary Krieger, now 44, was sitting in her parents' Boston home when her friend accidentally squirted himself with an orange slice. "I said, 'Oh, the orange just articulated," she recalls. "And he said, 'It did what?" The two made a five-dollar bet, and Hilary gleefully grabbed the family dictionary. She flipped to the "O" section and stared at the spot on the page where "orbisculate" should have been: "My first thought was, What's wrong with this dictionary?"

Aghast, Hilary burst into her dad's study and told him the shocking news: "Orbisculate" was not in the dictionary! Looking sheepish, her father confessed that he had made up the word when he was in college. He defined "orbisculate" as the action that happens "when you dig your spoon into a grapefruit and it squirts juice directly into your eye," though the family also applied it to other fruits and vegetables that unexpectedly spritzed. "We had been using it our whole lives as if it were a real word," Hilary says.

Out five dollars and wondering what other fake words might be lurking in her vocabulary, Hilary was mad. But she quickly came to see her dad's made-up word as a gift, one that encapsulated his mischievous and inventive spirit. "It speaks to his creativity and the idea that, even when something's painful and annoying, like getting grapefruit juice in your eye, you can laugh and have fun with it," she says.

Two decades later, Hilary told that funny story again and again, in sad circumstances. Her father, Neil Krieger, died of complications from Covid-19 in April 2020, at age 78. Since the Kriegers couldn't have a proper funeral, Hilary, who now lives in New York, spent a lot of time on the phone talking with friends and family, and the "orbisculate" story kept coming up.