Warning: This Fruit May Orbisculate!

Two siblings honor their father by trying to get his made-up word into the dictionary

- Sadie Dingfelder

IN THE EARLY aughts, Hilary Krieger was sitting in her parents’ Boston home when her friend accidentally squirted himself with an orange slice.

“I said, ‘Oh, the orange just orbisculated,” she recalls. “And he said, ‘It did what?’”

The two made a $5 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?” she says.

Aghast, Hilary burst into her dad’s study and told him the shocking news: Orbisculate was somehow not in the dictionary!

“And he looked kind of sheepish, and that’s when I found out that he made up this word when he was in college and had just been using it our whole lives, as if it were a real word,” Hilary says.

He’d always defined it as “when you dig your spoon into a grapefruit and it squirts juice directly into your eye,” she says, though the family also applied it to other fruits and vegetables that unexpectedly spritzed.

Out $5 and wondering what other fake words might be lurking in her vocabulary, Hilary was mad at the time. 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.”

Two decades later, Hilary found herself telling that funny story again and again, in some very 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 City, spent a lot of time on the phone talking with friends and family, and the orbisculate story kept coming up.

“I began to think, orbisculate is such a great word; it should be in the dictionary!” says Hilary, an editor.