No more 'nagging wives': how Oxford Dictionaries is cleaning up sexist language

After extensive research, reference publisher is quietly replacing examples that ‘unnecessarily perpetuate stereotypes’ – while also reflecting how language is used

In years past, a reader Googling the definition of “anatomy” on their phone would have found a couple of example sentences demonstrating how the word might be used: “He left dusty handprints on his lady customers’ anatomies,” or “She was unable to reach for the bag in case she revealed more of her anatomy than she already had.”

Not any more. After a huge project that involved picking over tens of thousands of example sentences, Oxford University Press (OUP) has been quietly replacing hundreds of those that “unnecessarily perpetuate sexist stereotypes” in Oxford Dictionaries, the dictionary source licensed by Apple and Google. Now the example given for anatomy is “people should never be reduced to their anatomies” – and the “lady customers” have been consigned to the past.

Women’s hair was always being described with adjectives like lustrous, and there was a lot of stuff about women’s appearance that wasn’t necessary

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