Is That Really a Word?
Peculiar Verbal Occurrences

So you're reading a book, happily wrapped up in the story, when your eyes bang right into a roadblock: it looks like a word, it acts like a word, you can almost guess what it might be supposed to mean; and yet you swear you never saw it before, and you have serious doubts as to whether it's "really" a word.

• Embrangled: (perhaps a portmanteau form of embroiled and entangled, this actually seems to be a word.)

  ...the problem of race has been the most difficult of resolution in American politics. It embrangled the original Constitution makers for months; it remains today, now that its violent frontier has moved North, the most explosive problem of our society.

  Theodore White, 'The Making of the President - 1960'.
• Fulcrumatic

  When the bomb finally went off in the New Mexico desert - this fulcrumatic moment in our species' history - it was beheld simultaneously, an exhilarating common experience, which is exactly what the movie house is supposed to deliver.

  Mark Jacobson, The New York Times, 30 July 2023.
• Legendry: (looks so much like a misspelling of "legendary"!)

  If conventions epitomize the mythology and legendry of American national politics, then Chicago epitomizes the convention city.

  Theodore White, 'The Making of the President - 1960'.
• Roweled: (a rowel is a spur)

  For twelve years now this problem of Negro vote and Negro rights has roweled the Democratic party.

  Theodore White, 'The Making of the President - 1960'.