Oxford English Dictionary Online Says Today:


'In the case of an example which has recently received much attention, of the phrase “rabid feminist” to exemplify the sense of rabid meaning ‘having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something’, the example is an accurate representation of the meaning of the word: rabid is used in this way to denigrate the noun it modifies, and the real-life sentence from which the example was taken involved someone denigrating a person described as being a feminist. However, it was a poorly chosen example in that the controversial and impolitic nature of the example distracted from the dictionary’s aim of describing and clarifying meaning. A more generic example, like “rabid extremist” or “rabid fan”, would also have been supported by evidence on our corpora, and would have illustrated the meaning of the word without those negative impacts.

OxfordDictionaries.com is constantly revising its entries and adding new material to reflect changes in English vocabulary and usage. Our staff endeavours to proactively identify and amend problematic definitions and examples, but with hundreds of thousands of definitions and examples this is a long-term, ongoing task, and it is very helpful when readers notify us of items requiring attention so that we can prioritize them for review. Fortunately, we are able to implement such changes much more rapidly in our online dictionary than it is feasible to do in print.'



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☆This article shows one example of what their viewpoint on language matters is. Good!

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