The Dictionary Deleted These Animals. What Happens When We Forget Their Names?

Say a thing’s name, and you keep it a little longer. Forget the name, and it begins to slip away- first from the tongue, then, perhaps, from the world.

This is about the words for nature that we are quietly letting go.

Written in the spirit of Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s The Lost Words (2017), a book of spells for summoning vanished words back.

First, an animal disappears from our words. Then from our world.

When nature disappeared from the dictionary

In 2007, a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary dropped around 40 words connected with nature. Among them were acorn, bluebell, fern, heron, kingfisher, newt, otter and willow. In their place were words that better reflected the language of contemporary childhood: broadband, blog, attachment, chatroom, cut-and-paste and voice-mail.

The dictionary was not declaring nature irrelevant. Its editors were working with the frequency of words in children’s everyday language. That may actually be the more unsettling part. The words disappeared from the dictionary because they were disappearing from use.

It is worth thinking about this on National Wildlife Day, observed on 4 September. The day was founded by Colleen Paige in 2005 and later became closely associated with Steve Irwin, whose life and work were rooted in getting people to notice, understand and care about wildlife.

Because how much can we care about something we no longer know how to name?

The book that called the words back

When writer Robert Macfarlane came across the missing nature words, he did not simply write about their disappearance. With illustrator Jackie Morris, he created The Lost Words in 2017.

The book turned words such as acorn, bluebell, kingfisher and otter into illustrated “spells”, calling them back into children’s language and imagination.

There is something quietly powerful about that idea.

What happens when we stop naming things

A creature does not have to become extinct for us to lose it. Sometimes the loss begins much earlier, when we stop pointing it out, stop saying its name and stop passing that name on to a child.

Think about the koel.

Maybe someone in your family could recognise its call without ever seeing the bird. Perhaps your grandmother knew names for birds, insects or animals in Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam or another language that you never learnt.

What happens when those words stop travelling from one generation to the next?

The animal is still there. The bird may still be sitting on the same branch. But without the word, we are a little less likely to notice it.

And when noticing disappears, something else goes with it.

Which words are we losing in India?

Children today can learn the names of hundreds of fictional characters, apps, games and internet trends. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Language has always changed along with the world around us.

But perhaps there should still be room for the kingfisher on the wire, the beetle under a leaf and the bird whose call announces the morning.

Knowing a name creates familiarity. Familiarity creates curiosity. Sometimes curiosity becomes affection, and affection makes us more willing to protect what is around us.

Conservation does not always begin with a wildlife documentary or a campaign to save an endangered species.

Sometimes it begins with someone saying, “Look, that’s a koel.”

A small way to keep them alive

So maybe don’t only look for the rarest animal on your feed. Look outside.

Learn the name of the bird outside your window. Ask someone older in your family what they called an animal when they were growing up. Find out whether your language has a word for a creature you have only ever known in English.

Then pass one of those names to someone younger.

Because keeping a word alive may also keep our attention alive.

What word will you keep alive this week?