In today’s day and age, it is incredibly easy for fake news to be spread. With platforms like deepfake and editing becoming easier and easier, telling the truth from false or an edit is just becoming difficult.
This is why when a post went viral on social media claiming that an edition of the Oxford Dictionary defined India as “old-fashioned, criminal, stupid” it is important to separate fact from truth.
What Was This Fake News?
As per the viral post, the Oxford Dictionary has a derogatory definition for India. It wrote “This is the real meaning of India which is still mentioned in the 1900 edition of Oxford Dictionary on page number 789. When the British gave this name to India, then the Oxford dictionary changed the meaning of India to Bharat, but its original meaning is old-fashioned people, criminals, stupid people.”
Also on 5th September, the Press Trust of India quoted Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Harnath Singh Yadav saying “Oxford dictionary describes ‘India’ as poor, uneducated people. The British deliberately linked people of ‘slave’ countries with the word ‘Ind’ or ‘India’. With all due respect towards the makers of our Constitution, I want to say that they committed a mistake by keeping both ‘India’ and ‘Bharat’ words in the Constitution.”
As per fact checkers though this is fake news and not true with BOOM fact checkers finding no mention of the word India or Indian in the earliest possible editions of the Oxford English Dictionary available online.
The archived Oxford Dictionary published in 1913 or Volume 1 does not have a definition for India on page number 789 since it only has words starting with ‘A’ and ‘B’ letters, neither does the archived Concise Oxford Dictionary Of Current English published in 1934 have those words on that particular page.
However, page number 580 did have a definition for India where the word is defined as “Country of S. Asia east of river Indus & south of Himalayas.”
The word ‘Indian’ was defined as “(Native) of India” and “one of the original inhabitants of America & W. Indies; European, esp. Englishman, formerly resident in India.”
Fact checker site Factly also made the same deduction that the claims made in the post are not true and that the word stating “The word India was not found on page number 789 in the Oxford Dictionary of the year 1934.
However, page 580 defines the term India as a country of South Asia east of the river Indus and south of the Himalayas. The word India in fact is derived from the name of an ancient river Indus or Sindhu in Sanskrit and was mentioned in Greek and Roman writings. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.”
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