In 2007, many common words describing the natural world disappeared from the new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary (OJD), which is aimed at seven-year-olds and is widely used in schools around the world. Not only are children increasingly dislocated from the actual wilderness of outdoors, but the words to describe the plants and creatures that they would find there are diminishing as well.

Which is why people who love the natural world are increasingly concerned about the loss of “nature words” – especially within the mouths and minds of children. What do we do with the places and creatures in our lives that we come to love? We name them. Words are how we connect to our experiences and to the other living beings in our lives. Words are how we orient ourselves in place and time, organize and understand our world. Words evoke sensations (scents, images, sounds), emotions (joy, fear, grief, anger) and memories. Certainly other species have their own forms of communication and maybe even languages, but it appears that we alone give precious weight to words. What sets us apart from all of our kith and kin in the animal kingdom is not our upright stance or our opposable thumbs but our absolute dependence on words.

The lost words book