Parents petition to bring back ‘natural’ words in Oxford Junior Dictionary

Almost 200,000 people have signed the petition.

Thousands of parents have hit out after the Oxford Junior Dictionary replaced some nature-related words with "modern" terms. The petition urges Oxford University Press to reverse the decision, originally made in 2008, that saw dozens of nature words dropped from the dictionary. The words removed included things like conker, dandelion, kingfisher, pasture and adder - and they were placed by things like "blog" and "chatroom". Terry Jackson, who started the petition, said:

"By removing many words to do with nature from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, children will, rather than caring for the Earth and everything on it, be more insular and lead less healthy lives."

The campaign was launched a few weeks ago, despite the changes having been made in 2007, and has since garnered plenty of support. Over 178,000 people have signed the petition already and the number continues to grow. Terry later updated the post to share  a response she received from the Oxford University Press. It read:

"Like you, we feel strongly that nature is essential to children’s lives and are encouraged to see that this is such an important issue to people. "We want to reassure you that nature words are alive and well in our dictionaries – they are not lost. Our 17 children’s dictionaries contain thousands of nature words. "The Junior Dictionary is a slim starter dictionary reflecting the language children use in the classroom, as required by the national curriculum. "Despite containing fewer words than the majority of our children’s dictionaries, it still devotes hundreds of words to the natural world."