Why Oxford Dictionary's synonyms for 'woman' have triggered a protest

London resident Giovanardi was searching for synonyms for "woman" to name a project she was involved with when she came upon the derogative references

What: The Oxford Dictionary has long been the holy book for all things semantics, but a petition against an entry in it has been picking up steam. Understandably so. In the current versions of Oxford English Dictionary, the synonyms for “woman” include some highly unsavoury words: b***h, besom, piece, bit, mare, baggage, wench, petticoat, frail, bird, biddy, filly.

Oxford’s head of lexical content Katherine Connor Martin has since said that “if there is evidence of an offensive or derogatory word or meaning being widely used in English, it will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that