Is ‘orbisculate’ a word? The late Neil Krieger’s children want it to be.

It’s happened to so many of us.

You’re eating a citrus fruit. Perhaps it’s a grapefruit.

You dig in, it lashes out at you and the juice flies into your eye.

When it happened to them as kids in Jamaica Plain, Jonathan and Hilary Krieger would say the fruit had “orbisculated.”

As in, “to orbisculate.” Meaning, “to accidentally squirt juice and/or pulp into one’s eye, as from a grapefruit when using a spoon to scoop out a section for eating.”

It wasn’t until the siblings were older that they learned “orbisculate” was not a real word.

Hilary Krieger, now 43 and an editor for NBC News’s THINK, was 24 when she used it with a friend who’d just studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

“We were eating fruit – I believe it was oranges – and I said, it ‘orbisculated on you,’” Krieger remembers. “[The friend] was like, ‘That’s not a word. ... My first feeling was pity. Like, this is going to be embarrassing when he finds out that this is a word.”

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They bet $5, and opened a dictionary.

“I’m looking and I’m looking ... and it’s not there,” Krieger said.

This discovery led her and her younger brother, Jonathan, into their dad’s office.

“I was like, Dad, what is wrong with this dictionary?,” Krieger said. “And he gave a sheepish look. He was like, ‘Well, technically, ‘orbisculate’ is not really a word.”

But it could be.

Neil Krieger was a scientist and entrepreneur. After 20 years teaching neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard medical schools, he founded West Rock Associates, a biotech grant recruitment firm. He was committed to civil rights activism, and was involved with the Boston chapter of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).

Krieger died of complications from COVID-19 on April 29. He was 78.

Now his adult children are on a mission. They want “orbisculate” added to the dictionary, to honor their father. (Also, it’s a perfectly useful intransitive verb, they say.) They’ve launched a website with a petition to dictionary editors. They’re also selling selling T-shirts with the word on them; all proceeds benefit Carson’s Village, an organization that helps families with resources right after a loss (the group does everything from helping to coordinate burials to setting up obituaries, for free).

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