In 2022, Merriam-Webster updated the definition of female to include “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”. This provoked all kinds of outrage on social media, and at least one spittle-flecked article in the National Review accusing the dictionary of caving to the trans agenda. “A female is a woman,” wrote its author, Jack Wolfsohn. “Trans-identifying males are not female.”
The reaction highlighted a commonly held view about what dictionaries are for. A decent dictionary, according to popular opinion, should set you straight on things; it should help you use words “correctly”. In Mr Wolfsohn’s view, the dictionary had erred in providing a definition of female that was factually untenable.
Of course he’s entitled to his view regarding who qualifies or not as female. But good luck finding a linguist or major dictionary that thinks a dictionary’s job includes ruling on objective truth. In the words of Britannica, linguists believe “that when a dictionary goes beyond its function of recording accurate information on the state of the language, it becomes a bad dictionary.”
Under this view, dictionaries are not arbiters but pulse takers. They’re not interested in what’s “correct” or “incorrect”, or even what’s true about the world, but in how users of the language are using the language (and, in some cases, how they used it in the past).
In Dictionary World, if enough people use the word female to include trans-identifying males, that’s now one definition of female.
It’s worth emphasising that it is but one definition. Some social media posters accused Merriam-Webster of replacing the previous definition of female with a new one, something easily checked. What Merriam-Webster actually did was add a definition of female to a list that already included ten or so variants.
Dictionaries make such additions all the time. Virus got updated when people began using that word to describe a certain kind of malicious computer program, but all the previous senses were also retained. You can be sure electric guitar didn’t appear in the first few issues of Merriam-Webster (first published in 1831), but it’s there in black and white now.
It’s also worth noting that dictionaries will vary in their choices. You won’t find “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male” as a definition of female in the Cambridge Dictionary. Dictionary.com offers “having or relating to a gender identity that corresponds to a complex, variable set of social and cultural roles, traits, and behaviors assigned to people of the sex that typically produces egg cells” as a definition. If nothing else, these variations demonstrate the fluidity of language and the impossibility of pinning it down.
If you’re interested in having a dictionary that reflects your world view, my best advice is to find one that does that and stick with it. Merriam-Webster, for example, has a long history of being more welcoming of new words and meanings than most. It was one of the first to accept like as a synonym for as (famously illustrated in the 1950s advertising tag line “Winston taste good like a cigarette should”), a move that many conservative commentators regarded as barbaric.
If you’re interested in having as broad a view of language as possible, look at what all the major dictionaries are doing and don’t treat any single one as the sole authority.
Regardless of what dictionary says what, Mr Wolfsohn is free to use female in its more usual sense, “woman, human being of the sex which brings forth young”. But he’s powerless to prevent other meanings emerging, and nor does it make sense for him to blame a dictionary for noting them when they do. Words and definitions make it into a dictionary because, in their editors’ view, their prevalence would make it perverse to not include them, not because someone has an agenda.
Not that people with an agenda haven’t tried to get their favoured words in. A few years ago, Canadian six-year-old Levi Budd coined the handy levidrome for a word which forms another when spelt backwards (like loop and spit). His parents then undertook an energetic campaign to have levidrome included in major dictionaries, even roping in fellow Canadian William Shatner to support the cause. But because levidrome never took hold in popular usage, the campaign failed. No major dictionary other than Wiktionary officially recognises the word.
As for female, you may be interested to know that etymologically speaking it is not at all related to male. It’s an early 14c word that was originally spelt femele after the Old French femelle, which came from the Latin femella. Male, on the other hand, is from the Latin masculus (which is also the source of the Spanish macho). In the Middle English period, someone decided femele must be related to male, and the current spelling became the norm.
Before English had female it probably had girl and certainly had woman. While there is no written record of girl being used before the early 14c, the OED, for one, suggests Old English may have had gyrele. The evidence for early versions of woman is much stronger. Late Old English had wimman, wiman, wimmen, wifman and wifmen, and Old English had wif. Wifman and its variants translate literally as woman man. If that sounds like an oxymoron to you, that’s because you’re a Modern English speaker. In Old English, man meant “human”, regardless of gender; a wifman was a female human.
Transgender is a modern invention, a variant of transgenderism, which psychiatrist John Oliven coined in 1965. Before then, transsexual was often preferred, but from the 1990s, transgender took hold as the umbrella term for anyone who doesn’t identify with their assigned or birth sex. Transsexual is now considered a pejorative term among some in the transgender community, while others are fine with it. If nothing else, this highlights that discussions of sex and gender can be charged and risky, and unless one’s looking for a fight, a little sensitivity can go a long way.
Fortunately, I’m as sensitive as they come. And I don’t care what anyone else says about that, the idiots.
Bits and specious
Nonsense from New Zealand’s Geonet website: “Science tells us that Rūaumoko [the son of Ranginui, the Sky Father, and his wife Papatūanuku, the Earth Mother] rumbles the Alpine Fault about every 300 years.” My question for Geonet is this: When religious nutjobs put the next earthquake down to their god’s anger against gays, how will you tell them science doesn’t support their contention and expect to be taken seriously?
Fuck didn’t appear in a single English language dictionary from 1795 to 1965. First to break ranks was the Penguin Dictionary. The word was outlawed in print in England by the Obscene Publications Act, 1857, and in the US by the Comstock Act, 1873. When Norman Mailer wrote his 1948 opus The Naked and the Dead, he used the euphemism fug (making the novel near unreadable, in my view). When Dorothy Parker met Mailer some time later, she quipped, “So you’re the man who can't spell fuck.” History doesn’t record whether he told her to go fug herself, but I kind of hope he did.
Quote of the week
Even I don't wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.
Cindy Crawford
For me, the problem with including a definition of female as "having a gender identity that is the opposite of male”, is that it should include a similar definition of male as "having a gender identity that is the opposite of female” - oyherwise you're excluding trans-men. And that creates a ahort of a linguistic loophole,a catch-22 if you want, or a tautology, as female would then be defined as "having a gender identity that is female".