In a buffer with emacs-lisp-mode active, 'define-error' is not fontified by font-lock mode. The keyword should be listed somewhere around line 360 in emacs-lisp/lisp-mode.el. Recipe: - Start emacs - Visit a file ending in .el - Type: (define-error 'new-error "this is a new error") - Wait for fontification to complete and notice it is not highlighted In lisp-mode.el, there is a comment about constructs being updated automatically from obarray, but I was not able to understand how this happens, and thought maybe the comment is referring to symbols created with those commands?