![]() Oxford Dictionaries initially responded flippantly to Oman-Reagan, replying to his criticism of its choice of “rabid feminist” with the tweet: “If only there were a word to describe how strongly you felt about feminism …” and going on to say that: “Our point is that ‘rabid’ isn’t necessarily a negative adjective, and that example sentence needn’t be negative either … our example sentences come from real-world use and aren’t definitions. Oxford Dictionaries attracted support from those who accused Oman-Reagan of being overly sensitive and politically correct, while others berated the esteemed text for dismissing what they. Shouldn’t the usage examples in this dictionary reflect that understanding of sexism in language?”īuzzfeed uncovered further gendered definitions, with usage for the word “nurse” including “he was gradually nursed back to health”, and “she nursed at the hospital for 30 years”, while examples of usage for doctor all used the male pronoun. “As the Oxford Dictionary says in the usage example for ‘sexism’: ‘sexism in language is an offensive reminder of the way the culture sees women’. “Why does the Oxford Dictionary of English portray women as ‘rabid feminists’ with mysterious ‘psyches’ speaking in ‘shrill voices’ who can’t do research or hold a PhD but can do ‘all the housework’?” wrote the academic on Medium. Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you.An example sentence given for “housework” was “she still does all the housework”, while a sentence using the word “research” was illustrated with the sentence “he prefaces his study with a useful summary of his own researches”. Since this dictionary went up, it has benefited from the suggestions of dozens of people I have never met, from around the world. It started with rabid, but there are so many more examples. The basic sources of this work are Weekley's "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English," Klein's "A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language," "Oxford English Dictionary" (second edition), "Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology," Holthausen's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache," and Kipfer and Chapman's "Dictionary of American Slang." A full list of print sources used in this compilation can be found here. Oxford Dictionary have been accused of sexism for using the term rabid feminist as an example to define being rabid. ![]() This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries. Obviously when they include rabid feminist they are actually choosing that example sentence from possible sentences, so why that one Oman-Reagan wrote. The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). The Oxford Learner’s Thesaurus explains the difference between groups of similar words. Etymologies are not definitions they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago. Amazingly, the publisher who supplies Google with its definitions has since agreed to review the English language following the feminist Twitter onslaught. ![]() The Oxford Dictionary of English is the default dictionary app. This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. The bossy group rabidly nagged the dictionary over its definitions and descriptions of ‘bossy’, ‘rabid’ and ‘nag’, in what has promptly been dubbed Dictionarygate. Screenshot of dictionary page showing that the rabid definition example is a rabid feminist.
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