The Language of Ethnic Conflict in English Online Lexicography: Ethnophaulisms in "powered by Oxford" Lexico.com

Abstract

This article aims to explore the relationship between the language of ethnic conflict (Allen 1983; Palmore 1962) and English online lexicography in the present cultural moment. Given the influence of the Internet on dictionary consulting (Béjoint 2016; Jackson 2017) and the alarming increase of racism and xenophobia, especially online, at the global level in this digital age (see Gagliardone et al. 2015), this article presents a pilot study examining the treatment of "ethnophaulisms" (Roback 1944), commonly referred to as ethnic or racial slurs, in the "powered by Oxford" dictionary content, which is licensed for use to technology giants like Google, Microsoft, and Apple by Oxford University Press (Ferrett and Dollinger 2021; Pettini 2021). In particular, the analysis focuses on the online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English, as hosted on the "powered by Oxford" Lexico.com website. Preliminary findings show how this free online dictionary mirrors the taboo and discriminatory nature of ethnophaulisms and warns the Internet user against the derogatory and offensive power of these words. Keywords: English lexicography, online dictionaries, linguistic racism, xenophobia, hate speech, ethnic slurs, ethnophaulisms, Oxford Dictionary of English, lexico.com

“View and Hide Definitions” of Racist Hate Speech: Ethnophaulisms in Google’s English Dictionary

“…As to English, the authors investigate only three general-purpose works including the Merriam-Webster.com dictionary site (2020), The Random House Unabridged Dictionary hosted on the Dictionary.com site (2020) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2020) hosted on Thefreedictionary.com site. Lastly, Pettini (2023a), which is the research this paper aims to extend, explores the treatment of 285 ethnophaulisms in the free online edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODEO) hosted on the "powered by Oxford" Lexico.com site (Note 2). Her analysis shows that the dictionary "quite clearly reflects the taboo nature of ethnophaulisms and quite consistently tends to warn the Internet user against the potentially racist and xenophobic power of these words" (Pettini, 2023a, p. 313).…”

“…As in Pettini (2023a), the lexemes to be analysed in this study have been extracted from Wikipedia, because it is the world's largest online encyclopaedia and one of the top ten most visited websites globally (Semrush, 2024). More specifically, data were derived from the "List of ethnic slurs" (Wikipedia, 2024, online), which is the first site that appears in Google search results when a general user of the Internet googles 'ethnic slur', and in which the latter is defined as "a term designed to insult others on the basis of race, ethnicity, or nationality" (Wikipedia, 2024, online).…”

“…In order to contribute to the debate about the language of racist hate speech in online English lexicography focusing on the perspective of the general user of the Internet, this paper presents the findings of the second stage of a research project (Pettini, 2023a) which examines the treatment of ethnic slurs, or "ethnophaulisms" (Roback, 1944), in the so-called "powered by Oxford Languages" content, a prime example of which is Google's English dictionary, the topic of the present article. As explained by Ferrett and Dollinger (2021) and by Pettini (2021Pettini ( , 2023aPettini ( , 2023b, "powered by Oxford Languages" is the content licensed for use by Oxford University Press (OUP hereafter) to the preinstalled dictionaries of market-leading operating systems like Microsoft and Apple and, more importantly, to the most popular search engine in the world, that is Google (Note 1). As concerns the latter, the use of search operators like 'define …', '… definition', and similar wording in Google's search bar in fact displays and explicitly mentions Oxford data, because "Google's English dictionary is provided by Oxford Languages" (Oxford Languages, n.d., online).…”