I think people can use the links below to access the Oxford English Dictionary, which is also on our University of Chicago Library site. I looked up definitions of “woman” and “female” to see what the OED says, as I regard it as the authoritative source of definitions used in everyday parlance. So here we go, and I’ve put the links so you can check for yourselves.
“woman”
https://www.oed.com/dictionary/woman_n?tab=meaning_and_use#14234972
“female” which gives a bit of a tautological definition for the noun usage:
But in the adjectival form, the OED gives a pretty accurate biological definition of “female”, though it adds “the gender identity associated with this sex”.
If you don’t like these (and feel free to browse around for definitions that you like better; I’ve given the first ones), complain to the OED, not me!
And, of course, things may change next year.
I think the next target of the engine of subversion will be “human” and “human being”.
I take it the call to incineration is sarcastic, or am I missing something?
For a historic comparison to OED’s crisp and modern definition, here is the entry of woman from the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (vol. III, 1771), in its entirety:
The “dictionary woman” is no doubt heaped upon the pile of insufficiency along with “dictionary atheist.” Though it may be grudgingly admitted that “adult human female” and “someone who lacks a belief in God” may be technically correct, this is rapidly followed by a barrage of nuance, complexity, multidimensionality, variability, and inclusivity because those terms must stand for something more.
Such as, for instance, social justice.
Just an aside on dictionary atheist. There seem to be two meanings. Lack of belief and disbelief in god. And both meanings have been in play for quite a while. My 1990 Concise OED gives only the strong definition while since then the weaker definition seems to have been more common. I have made it a hobby when visiting friends and family I look up the definition of atheist in their old dictionaries. Invariably (not a large sample size) it has been the strong definition.
I read somewhere—I can’t find a reference—that the author of the book Atheism: The Case Against God, George Smith, advocated for the weaker definition of atheism. If so, he seems to have been successful, though I suppose there are philosophical arguments to be made for the more traditional strong definition.
Though if one then looks up the word “disbelief” it means “not believing” or “not being able to believe”. Hence “disbelief” in God is much the same as “lack of” belief in God. It is not belief in not-God.
In Smith’s book (I read it several decades ago), he argued that one is either a theist or an atheist. Since agnostics are without a theology, they are atheists.
Lots of my fellow lawyers love dictionary definitions to prove something, and like here it is often helpful. But your (and Luana, Collin Wright, Hooven, etc.) essays on the seemingly complicated topic are much better. And waaaay more convincing.
D.A.
NYC
Yes, but I’m not really trying to convince anybody of anything in this post, which was meant to be lighthearted. But yes, they did get things largely right, though if they said “woman is anybody who says she is a woman”, I would take issue with it!
Only a matter of time.
Sadly, this change probably reflects the recent expansion of popular usage to regard sex and gender as synonyms.
The Trump administration’s definition of woman is pretty good,* as are the definitions of sex, male, man, boy, female, and girl. From his executive order: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/:
(a) “Sex” shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. “Sex” is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of “gender identity.”
(b) “Women” or “woman” and “girls” or “girl” shall mean adult and juvenile human females, respectively.
(c) “Men” or “man” and “boys” or “boy” shall mean adult and juvenile human males, respectively.
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
*I never thought I’d ever say something like this.
You might also enjoy the several articles by Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist at ANU, on the differences between popular language and technical language. I remember one, from many years ago, on the subject of why bamboo is not a grass, and why the tomato is not a fruit. Her point was that such language categories as “tree”, “grass,” “fruit” or “vegetable” may have ordinary language meanings that do not perfectly match with scientific language or technical language. So you will often hear that the tomato is “really” a fruit, but no one actually uses tomatoes that way, and the culinary category “fruit” (which does not include tomatoes) is just as useful, perhaps more useful, to us ordinary people than the botanical category “fruit.”
Dictionaries often fail to make such distinctions, or when they so it may be that either the popular definition or the technical/scientific definition is treated as simply one additional definition, rather than as a distinct semantic domain.
John Dupre has discussed the relationship between folk taxonomy and scientific taxonomy in an essay Are Whales Fish? He thinks that the old folk taxonomy is now dead, and that it is now part of folk taxonomy that whales are not fish. His discussion of the relationship between folk taxonomy and scientific taxonomy is extremely interesting. The essay is in a collection Folk Biology, edited by Douglas Medin and Scott Atran.
Interested readers can find it here
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/are-whales-fish/
Dupre makes the nice follow-up observation that the issue of whether whales were fish was legally important in a 19th century case in New York in which fish oil was taxed….
I wonder how the woke cope with German? Der Mann, male, Die Frau, female and Das Mädchen, neuter. Perhaps “it” is waiting until puberty to decide 🙂