The Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD) is a learning tool for children ages 7+ years that defines 10,000 words the publisher deems most popular in childhood conversation. In recent years, nature words like acorn, buttercup, heron, and wren were removed to make room for technology words like analogue, chatroom, and voicemail. Celebrity authors and others vehemently protested, citing evidence that connecting to nature is imperative for mental health and learning, particularly within the dictionary’s target age group. The publisher defended its decision, reiterating the dictionary merely reflects the language of its time, informed by the life experience of readers in the intended age group. 

 The fact that words like dandelion and doe, pelican and poppy were not part of the “life experience” of young readers concerns us. While these words are alive in the wild, children, especially those with limited access to natural places, have been robbed of language that might help them imagine the natural world beyond their doorsteps.  

The removal of these words, while disheartening, points to an underlying malady: “Nature Deficit Disorder” coined by Richard Louv in his Last Child in the Woods. Many years earlier, Rachel Carson foreshadowed this in The Sense of Wonder when she described:  “the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength”.  However we describe this deficit, children of all ages grow increasingly disconnected from nature.

Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’ beautiful work The Lost Words: A Spell Book keeps these words alive through eloquent spells and beautiful illustrations, and it inspired us. Over the past year, a group of North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) members have collected photographs of these Lost Words in an iNaturalist project and a photographic exhibit to bring attention to this detachment from the natural world. The loss diminishes their importance in connecting us with nature and the environment.

Terry Tempest-Williams mourned the loss of these words in her beautiful book The Hour of Land (2016):

"If you can remove words from a dictionary that are so alive with meaning and withhold them from our children, removing what is alive in the world becomes easy... The wild is no longer part of our vocabulary; nature becomes a forgotten language."

We suffer no illusions the publishers of the Oxford Junior Dictionary will restore these words in the physical, printed dictionary (they do appear in the online version of the dictionary), but we imagine and hope they will not be erased from the life experiences of our children. With our help and vigilance, they can grow into the next generation of conservation activists.  In the eloquent words of Baba Dioum (1968),  a forestry engineer from Senegal:

“In the end, we will only conserve what we love; we will only love what we understand; and we will only understand what we are taught”. 

Let’s teach our children not only the beauty and wonder of nature, but its importance as well; not just through the Internet and YouTube, but through experiencing it firsthand.