OXFORD JUNIOR DICTIONARY

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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’. 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. Our children's dictionaries provide a vital tool for helping children to improve their literacy skills and develop a passion for language.

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.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. 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. 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." 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. 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:

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.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.