OXFORD JUNIOR DICTIONARY

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I tried searching the Guardian Picture Desk for ‘cowslip’ but all I found was this freaky mutant buttercup. Photograph: Alamy Nowadays, the environment has changed. We are also much more multicultural. People don't go to Church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as "Pentecost" or "Whitsun" would have been in 20 years ago but not now." Our children's dictionaries provide a vital tool for helping children to improve their literacy skills and develop a passion for language.

Oxford University Press has removed words like "aisle", "bishop", "chapel", "empire" and "monarch" from its Junior Dictionary and replaced them with words like "blog", "broadband" and "celebrity". Dozens of words related to the countryside have also been culled. When we updated the Junior Dictionary (more than 10 years ago). As we do with all our dictionaries we used words that were being used by children at the time. As a result, a small number of words about nature, which are listed in the petition, were removed. However, new words about nature were introduced at the same time, including ‘amphibian’, ‘sunflower’ and ‘cobra’. These changes, the last of which occurred in 2008, quietly remained in place for several years. But in January 2015, a group of writers led by Margaret Atwood penned a letter to Oxford University Press urging them to reinstate some of the words that had been removed: We the undersigned are profoundly alarmed to learn that the Oxford Junior Dictionary has systematically been stripped of many words associated with nature and the countryside. We write to plead that the next edition sees the reinstatement of words cut since 2007. It’s not really that simple. We don’t directly replace one word with another word. We have an ongoing language research programme which ensures our dictionaries include words that children use in the classroom and words they hear in everyday use, which includes nature and technology words. The dictionary is powered by the Oxford Children’s Corpus, a unique database of millions of words written by and for children, to ensure our dictionaries contain words children come across and use.We are limited by how big the dictionary can be — little hands must be able to handle it — but we produce 17 children's dictionaries with different selections and numbers of words. I’m sympathetic to the campaign. They’re right to be concerned about a generation of indoor kids raised by cowardly parents, and the impact that may have on health, obesity, or even just the appreciation of nature and our place in it. It’s a tragedy that kids don’t get out more, and any effort to reverse the trend should be applauded. Secondly, childhood is undergoing profound change; some of this is negative; and the rapid decline in children’s connections to nature is a major problem. The Junior Dictionary is a very slim introductory dictionary containing less than 5,000 words in total. 400 of those words are about natural world, meaning roughly 8.5% of the total words are about nature. All the words listed in the petition appear in our best-selling and more relevant Oxford Primary Dictionary.

The Oxford Junior Dictionary is very much an introduction to language. It includes around 400 words related to nature including badger, bird, caterpillar, daffodil, feather, hedgehog, invertebrate, ladybird, ocean, python, sunflower, tadpole, vegetation, and zebra. Many words that do not appear in the Oxford Junior Dictionary are included in the Oxford Primary Dictionary; a more comprehensive dictionary designed to see students through to age 11. Words included in this title include mistletoe, gerbil, acorn, goldfish, guinea pig, dandelion, starling, fern, willow, conifer, heather, buttercup, sycamore, holly, ivy, and conker. The publisher claims the changes have been made to reflect the fact that Britain is a modern, multicultural, multifaith society. And just as in 2008, Oxford University Press (OUP) released a statement explaining how they decide which words to include and which words to remove from their dictionaries: Firstly, the job of a dictionary is to document words and usage, not dictate them. The Oxford English Dictionary is a historical record, analyzing contemporary writing and parsing the results according to strict guidelines to provide its users with an accurate depiction of how language is used.But academics and head teachers said that the changes to the 10,000 word Junior Dictionary could mean that children lose touch with Britain's heritage. We of course haven’t taken all words about nature out of our dictionaries. Our 17 children’s dictionaries contain thousands of nature words. In the last 40 yours our range of children's dictionaries has incread from two to 17, and as such the total number of words — including those about nature — has significantly increased across the range. The last change to the content of the Oxford Junior Dictionary was in 2008 and it still includes a large number of words focusing on the natural world. Our dictionaries are developed through a rigorous research programme, analyzing how children are currently using language. They also reflect the language thatt children are encourage to use in the classroom, as required by the national curriculum. This ensures they remain relevant and beneficial for children's education." The unfortunate truth is that most of the words I tried from Macfarlane’s list have fallen considerably in usage since the mid 20th century. Not all of them, and I’m not going to go through them all here, but you can play around for yourself and find little to contradict Oxford Dictionaries’ decision. When Macfarlane and others first objected to the dictionary’s cull of the likes of kingfisher and newt, lexicographers gave a teacherly retort that it isn’t a dictionary’s job to be didactic (true) and these words are no longer common currency, among children, curriculums or literature (false).

That leads me to a second complaint, expressed by a lot of people I know, that Oxford Dictionaries have somehow gotten their analysis wrong. Surely the idea that words like ‘acorn’ or ‘pasture’ or ‘conker’ are archaic is just bonkers, when these things are all around us? I would dearly love these people to be right, but I suspect the OJD corpus shows that they’re not, and that this disbelief has more to do with our own denial than any faulty scholarship on the part of the editors. I don’t have access to their database, but I can use a substitute. Google’s N-Gram viewer provides trends for the frequencies with which words appear in literature over the last two centuries. It’s not an exact match because it’s a different set of works than those used by Oxford Dictionaries, it includes American and British sources, and it covers adult literature too. However, it should give us some idea whether these words are in decline or not. Perhaps if lexicographers are clunked on the head by a falling conker they will realise that many simple wonders they’ve decided are no longer part of busy urban lives – magpies, otters – are actually thriving, even in cities, and are more numerous than they have been for decades. We base this plea on two considerations. Firstly, the belief that nature and culture have been linked from the beginnings of our history. For the first time ever, that link is in danger of becoming unravelled, to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment.