The latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary has dropped many words associated with Christianity and British history that were found in earlier versions.
Christian-related words like "bishop," "chapel," "disciple," "minister," "sin," and "devil," have been replaced by words like "blog," "biodegradable," "MP3 player," "democratic," and "celebrity," in the 2007 edition of the popular children's dictionary in the United Kingdom.
Although the newest version of the dictionary was released last year, the removal of words went largely unnoticed until Lisa Saunders, a mother of four from Northern Ireland, pointed them out.
She first realized the omission of words during a homework session with her son when couldn't find "moss" and "fern," which were in editions up until 2003, but were not included in the 2007 version, the Daily Telegraph reported.
The discovery prompted Saunders to compare entries from the older editions, dating from 1978, 1995, 2000, 2002, and 2003 with the latest junior dictionary.
"I was completely horrified by the vast number of words which have been removed," she told the Telegraph in London. "We know that language moves on and we can't be fuddy-duddy about it but you don't cull hundreds of important words in order to get in a different set of ICT words."
Vineeta Gupta, the head of children's dictionaries at Oxford University Press, told the Telegraph the changes were made to reflect a "multicultural" society.
Read it all here.
Anyone want to bet that the following words appear?
mosque
Ramadan
hadj
Qur'an
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