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The largest publisher by far of English language dictionaries for children is Oxford University Press (OUP), with its family of ‘17 children's dictionaries with different selections and numbers of words’ (quoted from Henry, Reference Henry2008). The content of one of them, Oxford Junior Dictionary, came under intense scrutiny in 2008 when it emerged that recent editions had removed many words relating to nature, Christianity, and other supposedly key aspects of British culture. This discovery was made by Lisa Saunders of Dromore, described by the London Telegraph newspaper as ‘a worried mother’ who had ‘painstakingly compared entries from the junior dictionaries, aimed at children aged seven or over, dating from 1978, 1995, 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007’ (Henry, Reference Henry2008). Saunders’ admirable sleuth work produced a list of over 150 deleted items (also published in the London Telegraph), beginning with carol, cracker, holly, ivy, mistletoe, proceeding through abbey, aisle; coronation, monarch, etc., and concluding with a large group of arguably rural words such as acorn, adder, allotment, blacksmith, cowslip, conker, diesel, lavender, liquorice, minnow, willow. The categories were not entirely clear - diesel and porridge were also listed in the last group - but the story, originally published in the Belfast Telegraph, went viral and provoked a torrent of outraged comment in newspapers and blog postings around the world. The problem was not just the omission of ‘traditional’ words but also their apparent replacement with newcomers relating to less obviously (or desirably) child-appropriate culture: electronic technological vocabulary such as blog, broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, and a more various group including bungee-jumping, celebrity, common sense, conflict, brainy, dyslexic, Euro and others.

The protestors ranged from environmentalists to head teachers. A Canadian ecologist asked, ‘If you can't name things, how can you love them? And if you don't love them, then you're not going to care a hoot about protecting them or voting for issues that would protect them,’ while the Master of Wellington College, an elite British independent school, commented, ‘I am stunned that words like “saint”, “buttercup”, “heather” and “sycamore” have all gone and I grieve it. I think as well as being descriptive, the Oxford Junior Dictionary has to be prescriptive too, suggesting not just words that are used but words that should be used. It has a duty to keep these words within usage, not merely pander to an audience’ (Getting Kids Outdoors, 2008; Henry, Reference Henry2008).

The story resurfaced again in January 2015, when 30 children's writers, academics, and prominent nature lovers – including internationally famous personages in the Anglophone literary world such as Michael Morpurgo, Margaret Atwood, and former British poet laureate Andrew Motion - petitioned OUP in an open letter, reported in the London Telegraph, to reinstate the deleted words associated with nature and the countryside (Atwood et al., Reference Atwood2015; Furness, Reference Furness2015). The signatories were ‘profoundly alarmed’ that the dictionary had ‘systematically been stripped’ in this way and felt that the link between nature and culture was ‘in danger of becoming unravelled, to the detriment of society, culture, and the natural environment’.

‘This is not just a romantic desire to reflect the rosy memories of our own childhoods onto today's youngsters,’ they added. ‘There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children's wellbeing.’ They went on to state their conviction that ‘The Oxford Dictionaries have a rightful authority and a leading place in cultural life. We believe the O[xford]J[unior]D[ictionary] should address these issues and that it should seek to help shape children's understanding of the world, not just to mirror its trends.’ Here was the nub of the matter: the widely perceived duty of a word-book for children to enact an exemplary role, not (or not just) a descriptive one.

OUP's responses to these criticisms were also widely published. They addressed the issues of book size (print dictionaries have room for only so many words) and the necessity to keep pace with language change. To decide, with each successive edition of their various children's dictionaries, which words should stay and which words should go, they turn to their own corpus evidence – the Oxford Children's Corpus, ‘a huge collection of children's literature, children's writing, and select websites’ which currently stands at around 100 million words (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.). The editors look at frequency as a key determiner for selecting which words to include: the more a word is used, the higher its chance of getting into the dictionary, and the converse is true also. The decline of countryside-related words in the Junior Dictionary, a comparatively small volume of 4,700 words in all – it is aimed at 7–9 year olds – will reflect a decline of their use in the language more generally. The editors also take account of words which are regularly misspelt, acknowledging that that is one of the main reasons children or indeed all of us use dictionaries, and determine the content of children's dictionaries with an eye to the British National Curriculum as well as other age-relevant sources of vocabulary.Footnote ¹ However, ‘all our dictionaries,’ they say firmly, echoing the quotation from Craigie in 1934 with which this article began, ‘are designed to reflect language as it is used, rather than seeking to prescribe certain words or word usages’ (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.).

So if we think about the function of children's dictionaries today, we have to accept that British children are far less likely to live in rural environments than they used to be – and less likely, perhaps, to play outdoors as well. Words related to nature are consequently declining in the English language to which British children are regularly exposed, while those related to more prominent aspects of their day-to-day environment, be that technology- or celebrity-related, are increasing. That may be lamentable but it is a fact, and is not to be blamed on dictionaries. Oxford children's dictionaries, the argument runs, are not in the business of saving the environment any more than they are of solving any other world problem – Greek debt, for example, or alleged corruption at FIFA, football's world governing body. It is language usage that drives dictionaries, not the other way round.

Correctness

No respectable lexicographer would disagree with Oxford University Press's position here. However, children's dictionaries cannot be quite let off the hook in the way the publisher is suggesting. It is not the case that these dictionaries, any more than most adult dictionaries or dictionaries for English language learners, ‘reflect language as it is used, rather than seeking to prescribe certain words or word usages’. For example, all children, and all language users, are exposed to a variety of language use on the street, on television and radio stations, and on the internet. No children's dictionaries that I know of list four-letter words among their entries, nor do they record the many highly colloquial usages encountered by most of us on a daily basis (not least, to speak from personal experience, in our own homes and on our own lips). The criterion for exclusion operating here is not (in)frequency, but (un)suitability. Most of us would be content with this decision and would not think of complaining about the exclusion of such words from a size-limited children's dictionary. Some of us, however, may raise an eyebrow at the overtly prescriptive definitions and usage notes attached to items that do get across the children's dictionary threshold.

The easiest ones to find are those for long-standing shibboleths of correct (or ‘correct’) usage. The verb infer has long been used to mean pretty much the same as imply, i.e. ‘to lead to or suggest something as a conclusion’. The OED currently lists examples of this usage from 1530 to 1973, though an editorial note added in 1976 observes ‘This use is widely considered to be incorrect’. This careful comment conforms to the norms of modern lexicographical descriptivism (note its choice of ‘widely considered to be’, not ‘is’), but The New Oxford Dictionary of English threw caution to the winds in 1998 and declared that infer used in this way was a straightforward ‘error’ - though an error ‘common enough for some dictionaries to record it as a more or less standard use’. The New Oxford's choice of vocabulary here draws attention, apparently unintentionally, to the difficulties of diagnosing correct and incorrect usage. When is an ‘error’ sufficiently ‘common’ to become ‘standard’? Language changes, and what appears incorrect to some users at one period in history may become generally unremarkable in the next. Examples of this phenomenon abound throughout recorded English: in 1711 Joseph Addison (like many others) objected to the recently popular abbreviation mob for mobile vulgus; in 1961 critics of Webster's Third International Dictionary objected to the recently emerged verb finalize (Bolton, Reference Bolton and Crystal1966, vol 1: 104; Sledd & Ebitt, Reference Sledd and Ebbitt1962). Plus ça change…

If English dictionaries for adults vary in their treatment of the different senses of such words, what do and should children's dictionaries do? I have looked up infer and a number of other terms in four children's dictionaries currently (July 2015) on the shelves of my local (Oxford) branches of Waterstones and Blackwells: the Usborne Illustrated Dictionary, the Collins School Dictionary (both published in Reference O'Neill and Summers2014), the Oxford School Dictionary (Reference Delahunty2011), and the Oxford Junior Illustrated Dictionary (Reference Dignen and Dooner2013).Footnote ² All four give one possible meaning only for infer, expressed by the Usborne Illustrated as ‘to draw a conclusion from something that someone says or does’. The Oxford School Dictionary issues an additional stern warning:

This dictionary supplies many other such warnings, for example on criterion: (‘Note that criteria is a plural. It is incorrect to say “a criteria” or “this criteria”; correct usage is this criterion, these criteria’), disinterested (‘It is not accepted as part of standard English to use this word as if it means “not interested” or “bored”. If this is what you mean, use uninterested’), media (‘This word is a plural and should have a plural verb. Although it is commonly used with a singular verb, this is not generally approved of. Say the media are (not “is”) very influential. It is incorrect to speak of one of them (e.g. television) as a media or this media’).

Thankfully (if I dare use this locution) the Oxford School displays more tolerance and nuance where graffiti is (are) concerned.Footnote ³ ‘Strictly speaking,’ it says, this word is a plural noun… so it should be used with a plural verb… However, the word is widely used nowadays as if it were a singular noun and most people do not regard this as wrong…’ The same comparative broadmindedness is on show in the entry for hopefully: ‘Some people say that it is incorrect to use hopefully to mean “I hope that” or “let's hope”, and say that it should only be used to mean “in a hopeful way”. The first use is very common in informal language but you should probably avoid it when you are writing or speaking formally’.

Treatment of these words in the other three dictionaries varies. Criterion and disinterested are not in the Usborne or Oxford Junior; Collins agrees with the Oxford School that criteria requires a plural verb but expresses this view less proscriptively (‘Criteria is the plural of criterion, and needs to be used with a plural verb’). Collins is similarly less dismissive, if not altogether accepting, of the widely prevalent use of disinterested as a synonym of uninterested, noting that while ‘some people use disinterested to mean “not interested”’, ‘the word they should use is “uninterested”’. Where media is concerned, the Usborne and Oxford Junior both agree that the word is plural, but issue no warnings on improper use, while for its part Collins offers a ‘grammar tip’ distinctly milder than the strictures of the Oxford School: ‘Although media is a plural noun, it is becoming more common for it to be used as a singular’. The Usborne and Oxford Junior do not sound any alarm bells about the use of graffiti, either; indeed, Usborne specifically states that it is a singular or plural noun. Collins says the same, noting that in the source language, Italian, the word is plural. On hopefully Collins takes pretty much the same line as the Oxford School (although ‘very common in speech, it should be avoided in written work’) and the word is listed but not defined in Usborne. Surprisingly, the Oxford Junior supplies no warning against hopefully at all; on the contrary, it offers ‘Hopefully we can all go to the sea tomorrow’ as an example of (demonstrably acceptable) usage.

Such variations – not just between different dictionaries, but between different dictionaries from the same publisher - indicate how difficult it is to find consistent agreement on matters of usage, and how wary dictionaries should be about issuing diktats purporting to be authoritative. Almost all the usages above have become commonplace in the last decades, and the Oxford School's choice of which to warn against and which to proscribe altogether can be baffling. This is particularly so in the case of media as a singular noun, on record for decades in other Oxford dictionaries as, in Collins's words, ‘becoming more common’. In 1966, as recorded by the OED, Kingsley Amis noted in the New Statesman that ‘The treatment of media as a singular noun … is spreading into the upper cultural strata’ (Amis Reference Amis1966: 51). That remark was quoted in the 1976 Supplement to the OED and reprinted in the second edition of OED in 1989. The most authoritative witness for current as well as past usage, the third edition of the OED, updated this entry further in 2001, listing an array of recent examples of media used both with a singular verb and as a singular form with a plural in –s. The 1966 quotation from Amis was reproduced in an optionally viewable section on etymology, as historical evidence that such uses ‘have both been regarded [i.e. in the past] by some as nonstandard and objectionable’. Any user of English will be able to report from the evidence of their own ears that OED is right: media is now used as a singular noun in a range of more as well as less authoritative sources. It is ludicrous to quibble about it, let alone prohibit children from using it.

Language errors or inappropriate vocabulary will incur penalties in school exams, so the job of a children's dictionary is to identify these and help children avoid them – as well as to ensure they use words precisely and accurately. But some of the rules being laid down by OED's younger sibling, the Oxford School Dictionary, have no relevance to English as it is generally used today and have long been exposed as baseless by both grammarians and lexicographers. It is hard to see how this is compatible with the claims issued by Oxford University Press that all their dictionaries ‘reflect language as it is used, rather than seeking to prescribe certain words or word usages’.

Cultural bias

More fascinating than such overt statements on usage, however, are the covert views implied by the way dictionaries treat certain other categories of vocabulary. ‘Surprised to see “Abortion” in a Childrens [sic] Dictionary. Very awkward having to explain its meaning in words that my Son understood’, reads a comment posted on 8 April 2015 on the Amazon page for the ‘#1 Best Seller in Children's Dictionaries’, the Oxford Children's Dictionary (Amazon, n.d.). No entry for abortion is to be found in the current edition of this dictionary, published a month later in May 2015, nor is there one in the Oxford Junior (or Usborne); the author of the comment may (understandably) have got confused between different Oxford dictionaries, so it is difficult to know exactly what gave offence – but illuminating to explore how children's dictionaries treat such culturally sensitive vocabulary.Footnote ⁴ The Oxford School tells us, neutrally and simply enough, that abortion is ‘an operation to remove an unborn child from the womb before it has developed enough to survive’, but the Collins definition comes as something of a shock: ‘If a woman has an abortion, the pregnancy is ended deliberately and the baby dies’. This implies a value judgement, as does – even more so – the decision to print, in the entry for the verb abort, the expository statement that ‘If a pregnant woman aborts, the pregnancy ends too soon and the baby dies’. Abort is not found in the Oxford Junior and neither Usborne nor Oxford School, who do include it, specify a sense relating to pregnancy. In its choice of grammar and phrasing Collins appears to be going out of its way to impute murderous intent to the pregnant woman. In both definitions, the woman is represented as the agent and the foetus is identified as a baby; in the second definition, the termination is specified as occurring at a point ‘too soon’ in the pregnancy. Collins thus occludes the possibility, allowed by the more lexicographically as well as literally correct Oxford, that abortions may be performed on women at different stages of pregnancy (not necessarily ‘too soon’) for a variety of morally and medically justified reasons, including the health and life chances of the mother. Its entry breaks the standard rules of impartial definition-writing and is the most naked example of culturally selective bias I have ever encountered in a respectable contemporary dictionary of English.

Sex and sexuality is another tricky area for lexicographers, and here all four dictionaries are on a low par. Penis is uniformly said to be the part of the male body used for urinating and ‘sexual intercourse’ – no problem there. An enterprising child looking up sexual intercourse, however, will be altogether thwarted by the Oxford Junior, in which this term is neither listed nor defined, and variously misled by the definitions in the three remaining works. The Oxford School Dictionary comes up with the following: ‘an intimate act between two people, in which the man puts his penis into the woman's vagina, to express love, for pleasure, or to conceive a child’, and should be congratulated for identifying ‘love’ and/or ‘pleasure’, not just procreation, as a motive for the act. Marks must be deducted, however, not only for the exclusion of same-sex coupling but also for the restriction of agency to the male of the species. Usborne is more laconic, but also explicitly heterosexual and androcentric: ‘an intimate physical act between a man and a woman, in which a man's penis enters a woman's vagina’. Collins is positively clipped: ‘Sexual intercourse is the physical act of sex between two people’. This is not androcentric but emerges as hetero-normative when read in conjunction with the same dictionary's definition of sex as ‘the physical activity by which people and animals produce young’. Both Collins definitions, be it noted, omit any reference to intimacy, love or pleasure.

The combined testimony of these four dictionaries smacks strongly of homophobic censorship, not least since OED's entry (updated in 2008) states clearly that the term may refer to ‘any form of sexual contact of this kind between members of the same sex’, with a quotation dated 1969.Footnote ⁵ But I would guess such censorship is quite unconscious. A different sort of bias, probably equally unconscious, is revealed by comparing definitions for penis with those for vagina. As just stated, all four dictionaries specify urination and sexual intercourse as the function of the former; none say anything about procreation. By contrast, procreation is the theme underlying all four definitions of vagina, which describe this female organ not as an object or entity in and of itself but as ‘the passage’ which connects (Collins) or leads either from (Usborne) or to (Oxford Junior) ‘the womb’, Usborne helpfully adding ‘through which babies are born’. Collins refers to a woman's ‘outer sex organs’ at one end, but the other three avoid any mention of these and indeed any mention of sex altogether. In fact women's outer genitalia are virtually ignored: no definition for them can be found in any of Usborne, Collins, or Oxford Junior, though the Oxford School is braver in including both clitoris (with insufficient explanation, this is said to be ‘the small sensitive lump of flesh near the opening of a woman's vagina’) and vulva (‘the outer parts of the female genitals’). Similarly, all four dictionaries define breasts in terms of their milk-producing function for offspring, with no allusion whatsoever to sex or sexuality. It is irresistible to see this gendered contrast between definitions for and treatment of the male (sole) and female (multiple) sexual organs as reflecting normative and restrictive views on male and female sexuality. Female sexuality is represented as confined to reproduction, male is not.

Are these the sort of cultural biases, whether homophobic or sexist, that we want or expect from our children's dictionaries? The answer must be no. It should also be said, however, that similarly inflected definitions for sexual interaction and for male and female sexual organs can be found in many general dictionaries – and moreover, the scrupulousness with which children's dictionaries treat many aspects of sexuality and sexism, along with the vocabulary of other culturally sensitive areas like race and religion, indicates that the examples above are unintended vestiges of social attitudes which for the most part have been consciously re-written in lexicographical as well as other public discourses. So definitions for lesbian and homosexual in the three dictionaries which define these words (absent from the Oxford Junior) are quite unexceptionable, and the same is true, mostly, of the treatment in all four dictionaries of words relating to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and the Sikh religion. (I have not carried out an exhaustive comparison, but note that in the Oxford School alone there is a slight but perceptible favouring of Christianity, in that the period in which the historical figure Jesus Christ lived is not specified, unlike that of other named religious figureheads).Footnote ⁶