“A situation in which urgent action is required”: The language of the climate emergency in Oxford online English dictionaries

In order to foster debate on the treatment of vocabulary related to climate change and environmental sustainability in online English lexicography and, thus, to contribute to the development of an area of great academic interest in Linguistics from a metalexicographic perspective, this paper investigates the language of the climate emergency in three Oxford online English dictionaries, namely the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (OALD), and “powered by Oxford Languages” Google’s English Dictionary. The rationale behind this research lies in the special attention recently paid by lexicographers at Oxford University Press to this evolving area of language, an interest which manifested itself first in 2019, when the phrase climate emergency was named the Oxford Word of the Year and the entire shortlist was chosen exclusively from climate-related language, and secondly, in 2021 when the editors of the historical OED embarked on a research project which led to the October 2021 update, with almost 100 revised and new climate-related entries and senses added to the dictionary. What attracted lexicographers’ attention was the prominence of climate vocabulary in written and spoken communication and the dramatic increase in more emotive and strategic language applied to this global issue. Accordingly, with a descriptive and comparative approach, this pilot study examines a sample of lemmas representing this language development in Oxford research and shows whether and how the three dictionaries record and mirror the sense of urgency, or the tell it like it is strategy characterising people’s language choices for their respective target users.