Wed 9 Apr 2008
Addressing Our Weaknesses
Posted by Barbara Ann Kipfer under Thesaurus.com
Hi, I’m Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD., editor and compiler of Roget’s New Millenium Thesaurus. The synonym “weaker sex” appears in many thesauruses for terms like woman, lady, and female. It is considered an informal, possibly derogatory, synonym for those words. Due to the way our search technology works, a search for weaker appeared to suggest that it was a synonym for female and lady. This was incorrect and has been fixed.
We take your concerns about language and society seriously (this is, after all, our business) and after reading feedback on the entries for female and lady, we carefully reviewed our editorial decisions. In light of how our customers use Thesaurus.com on a daily basis, we chose to remove “weaker sex” as a informal/slang synonym from our site. The entries now describe current American English usage more accurately and we feel we’re providing more helpful suggestions for those seeking guidance on word choice from us.
We apologize for any confusion this situation may have caused and hope you’ll stay in touch with us as we strive to improve all the learning resources we provide on Thesaurus.com, Dictionary.com and Reference.com.
38 Responses to “Addressing Our Weaknesses”
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April 10th, 2008 at 9:16 am[…] know how I was all pissed off yesterday? Well, Thesaurus.com fixed it! From their blog: We take your concerns about language and society seriously (this is, after all, our business) and […]
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April 18th, 2008 at 11:32 am[…] a similar rant at Feministing got the attention of Thesaurus.com’s corporate owner, Lexico. A post on Lexico’s blog from April 9 written by one Barbara Ann Kipfer, PhD (whom I’m sorry to say is the editor and compiler of […]
April 10th, 2008 at 5:06 am
The entry wasn’t “weaker sex.” It was weaker. When you searched for weaker, you got synonyms for woman. And now when you search for it, you get no entries, so I guess there is no synonym for that word that doesn’t relate to femininity in the eyes of your “search engine.”
Hopefully you have read through the comments on feministing.com and other sites. If you have, you know that your thesaurus is full of this kind of error, such as woman and girl being synonyms but man and boy being antonyms. I suggest a more thorough check of your system than has been performed.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:02 am
Nice to see such a quick response. Whenever I come across a funky term like that, I always smirk, because I think it accurately represents the language, complete with historical biases. Maybe people don’t use “weaker sex” in daily discussions anymore, but at one point they did, and dictionaries are around (IMO) to document that, too.
That said, kudos on the change and on keeping your fingers on the pulse this language. Just don’t shy away from political incorrectness, because that would be a greater fallacy for linguistics, no?
April 10th, 2008 at 6:21 am
How about you take out the following offensive synonyms to woman as well?
babe, broad, chick, chicken, kitten, rib, skirt, spinster, tootsie, virgin
April 10th, 2008 at 6:23 am
I suppose that “changeable” as a synonym for “woman” didn’t seem inappropriate, archaic, or derogatory? (Or would taking that ostensible synonym out merely prove its propriety?)
April 10th, 2008 at 7:26 am
Thank you for taking this seriously, and for promptly correcting the entry.
April 10th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Thanks for fixing this!
April 10th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I think it’s great that you got rid of the horrifyingly sexist term “weaker sex” as a synonym for “lady” and “female” - the fact that you are willing to consider the impact of your content is great… and it will keep me from having to switch to using another website in protest!
Along those lines, you should consider looking into the differences between the synonyms for “man” and “woman” - the difference in definition on thesaurus.com is appalling.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:28 am
Also, “weak” is still listed as a synonym for “female” - are you planning to change that as well, since those words don’t mean the same thing at all?
April 10th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
I appreciate you reacting to this so quickly, but as many others have posted above, there are still some really big “cracks” in your entries - for instance (in addition to the others mentioned), do you realize that you have “seduction” as a synonym for “rape”?
I mean come now, I don’t think anyone would agree in ANY historical reference that that is OK…..
Thanks
April 10th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Thank you for promptly correcting this error.
Kudos to Alexis Taines, a women’s history graduate student at Sarah Lawrence College, for first discovering the error.
April 17th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Well, how exactly did you fix it? Because when I enter weaker now, I get nothing at all! Well, that’s not true; I get a message that asks, “Did you mean weaker?” I click on weaker, and I get that message again. What gives? 65% of your synonyms seem to have disappeared just since Monday, and I’ve gotten several such messages like that. Did you reduce your number of sources, or have a system crash? Suddenly this resource that I loved is far less useful.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I think the source for the thesaurus has changed.
It’s now Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition.
This is not the same source. Anyone else even see this? I use it everyday and I noticed.. apparently the people whom claim to use it everyday, really don’t see this, or are experiencing “cite blindess”.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
ok, for anyone wondering:
pre April 14th:
Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus
post April 14th:
Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition
So for whatever the reason, the source were changed. Apparently the current content (which I’m sure is copyright) is from Roget II. So basically this source seems a little thin yes?
Is there anything that can be done to help beef up the source a little more? Maybe add more sources to the results?
April 18th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Scott,
I use it every day as well, but did not notice the source change, only that the wide variety of word choices had suddenly disappeared.
What was the reason for the change? New Millenium had a copyright date of 2008, and Roget II 2003 and 1995.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
LNS, I’m not sure what the reason for the change was.
I was hoping that someone from the company was going to post about this soon, as I’ve seen this on a couple blogs now..
I was in contact with a lexicog’ however there has been no word yet as to why.. I’m guessing the more we post about it, the more enticed the lexicog’s might be to provide us with that info.
I’m guessing given their history we will see something shortly.
April 18th, 2008 at 2:41 pm
I’m really interested to know. Thesaurus.com had been far and away the best thesaurus on the Web–or print too for that matter.
April 20th, 2008 at 8:14 am
OK, now we’ve all recovered from what is clearly an archaic (but hey, still accurate from a historical perspective) term and the way that thesaurus.com’s technology works, and I have no synonyms.
I’d much rather have my pick of the bunch, PC or not. Rather than very minimal entries, which is what I’m getting right now.
April 20th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I assume I’m not the only one to find the changes to “woman” and “lady” appalling? Here’s just another reason not to trust this source - they edit out words/phrases found to be currently out of favor - the worst kind of censor.
Several words/phrases come to mind for this practice: “C”onservative, reactionary, chicken, elitist, out-of-touch, politically-correct, sexist, Orwellian. . .
April 21st, 2008 at 10:42 am
Evan,
How about “Gilliam-esque”? In the service of political correctness, half the language vanishes. If the two events aren’t related, we have yet to receive any other explanation.
April 22nd, 2008 at 6:18 am
Censoring or not, the quality of this thesaurus.com has gone down the tubes to the point of being unusable. Returned entries for any number of words that I enter are way to limited. I will need to find another web source.
April 23rd, 2008 at 7:50 am
Yep: Thesaurus.com is now more or less a dead site. Where did all of the thesauri go? What was once the best meta-thesaurus is now merely a port for Roget’s II. That ain’t helpful.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:20 am
First, it is absurd to remove synonyms because they are thought to be politically incorrect. A thesaurus is a descriptive tool, and its listings should not be taken to make value judgments, or edited because they might inadvertently give offense. Such censorship significantly reduces the authority of the reference.
But second, thesaurus.com is now essentially useless. Instead of using a thesaurus based on Roget’s, it apparently now (as of 14 April 2008) uses a piece of junk from Houghton Mifflin called “Roget’s II”. This new thesaurus is incomparably inferior to the old, and I can’t imagine myself using thesaurus.com after the change. Please change it back.
April 26th, 2008 at 8:23 am
I returned to this post to complain about the revisions I initially hailed. Quite simply, the number of results for Thesaurus has been slashed, and I find the service hardly useful anymore. Please consider revamping it by bolstering the number of results again, as that’s precisely what I loved some much about the tool.
It’s nice and all that you guys want to be PC, but please don’t hamstring yourselves over that goal.
April 29th, 2008 at 2:06 am
I don’t know if anyone has mentioned but I don’t think the term “weaker sex” should even exist. Neither sex should be weaker than the other.
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:14 am
I’m reading all of these comments and, although I am truly empathetic, the fact is we are here engaging in revisionist linguistics because a previously common usage is no longer politically correct. The fact of the matter is that “weaker sex” is a synonym for female in American English. Even though you find it distasteful, erasing it from an on-line dictionary is not going to change that. The best thing to do would be to leave it in place but label it “archaic” as is done with other terms which have fallen out of favor.
May 2nd, 2008 at 8:01 pm
Some good news: the glory that was thesaurus.com is still available on the Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/index.php
Still waiting on an explanation for the change.
May 7th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Like many other commenters on this blog, I have decided to stop using thesaurus.com, which I had on my bookmark bar I used it so often. I did a search on “interesting” today which yielded NO, ZERO, ZIP results. Again, like many others, I wish the company would explain just what happened and why. Meanwhile, I’m outta here. This is now worse than the thesaurus that comes with WORD, and that’s pretty bad.
May 11th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Yes, Thesaurus.com is AWFUL, AWFUL, AWFUL now. Why did you change it? No one I know bothers with it anymore, it’s completely useless… Remember “New Coke”? At least that company had the sense to admit their mistake and bring an old favorite back!
May 13th, 2008 at 8:06 am
To take a service that countless users have appreciated and relied on for years and suddenly render it useless while refusing to provide any explanation is incredibly disrespectful.
May 17th, 2008 at 5:24 am
Is the death of Thesaurus.com really due to the polemic teeth-gnashing of a few people over the listing of certain words? I seriously hope not. I concur with user Steven above. List the word(s) as “archaic” or “colloquial” and everyone else get over it. This is a thesaurus, not a tool for censorship. “We take your concerns about language and society very seriously?” Are you joking? For those of us who are in love with words, such grousing over–and eventual eradication of–certain words smells way too Orwellian. And reducing the overall search results to a completely useless website doesn’t help. I find this whole business “double minus bad.”
June 25th, 2008 at 9:58 am
I have been using thesaurus.com for years, and I am fuming at the current state of affairs. I used to get hundreds of results when typing in words, and now I am lucky if I get a dozen. This situation is intolerable.
The simple truth is that “concerns about language” alone cannot explain this sudden turn towards mediocrity. Words that are absolutely neutral yield only a handful of synonyms.
I have yet to find an official explanation for this drastic change, but it seems the company isn’t really interested in what users think.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:43 pm
This is a blatant example of censorship in the name of political correctness. I cannot believe the extent to which some people will go to in order to make people “feel” better about themselves. History is what it is, weaker sex is connected to women and it is historically correct. Would you strike the word “nigger” from the dictionary? It is a highly offensive word but nonetheless it is part of the lexicon of our country. You need to keep things factual not emotional, and by the way a fascist has NOTHING to do with having “extreme right-wing views” KEEP THE DICTIONARY FACTUAL!!!!!!!
July 8th, 2008 at 5:22 am
Glad to see you sorted that out but now what are you going to do about your definition of ’sexism’ which apparently is “discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex, as in restricted job opportunities; esp., such discrimination directed against women.” and “Discrimination based on gender, especially discrimination against women.”
You do realise sexism applies to both genders right?
July 8th, 2008 at 9:33 am
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On behalf of the victims of the Kimkins scam, I plead with you to reconsider accepting Kimkins sponsorship at your site. Thank you!
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July 8th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
So the quest for politically correct words led to the demise of the once brilliant thesaurus.com? In my female and feminist opinion, the trade-off is a disaster.
We’re now left with a pale and pathetic imitation of the original. And there seems to be no remedy in sight.
Does anyone know how/where to access the old Thesaurus.com? I’d pay serious money to be able use it again. (I was a paying member of dictionary.com, but it’s now not worth the investment.)
July 20th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
thank goodness i’m not the only one who thinks this is relentless encroachment of political correctness. it’s not the job of wordsmith to determine the appropriateness of a word, only to document it.