![]() The whistleblower’s image has never been good. But the OED also tells us that there has never been a time when English was without a word for whistleblower, or when words for whistleblower have not been negative. These days no one launches petition drives to redeem the image of whiddlers and quadruplators, hoping that more whiddlers and quadruplators will come forward to report fraud, waste, or abuse. It’s true that many of the OED’s synonyms for informer are obsolete. The lawyers at whistleblower firms might want the likes of Julian Assange and Edward Snowden for clients, but they might not want to meet them for a pint after work. That’s a whole lot of negativity, and it suggests that even if whistleblowers perform a valuable service, they themselves are not perceived as folks you’d want to friend on Facebook. According to the OED, negative terms for whistleblower are among the oldest negative words in English, going back to wrayer, used around 1100 to mean ‘betrayer, snitch.’ Others include: wrobber, denunciator, sycophant, quadruplator, emphanist, whiddler, runner, slag, squeak, type, telegraph, pig, rounder, screamer, shopper, narker, tout, rat fink, informer, and deep throat. And even if a petition suddenly made whistleblowers popular, law firms specializing in whistleblower cases would still have fewer clients.īut that’s not going to happen, because, whether or not you want to root out fraud, waste, and abuse in government or the business world, not liking whistleblowers is nothing new. That’s because speakers of English, the ultimate source of dictionary definitions, don’t like whistleblowers. and list a few negative synonyms for whistleblower, but the Oxford English Dictionary, which is not a target of the petition, lists 56 synonyms, and all but one or two of them are negative. There are laws protecting whistleblowers, and both government and corporate policies of “see something, say something.” And once in a while a whistleblower is celebrated as a hero, like when Upton Sinclair exposed the unsavory practices of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle in 1906, though five publishers rejected the book because it was too negative, plus, nobody likes a whistleblower.Īnd that’s the problem: whistleblowing may lead to beneficial change, but it’s also true that nobody likes a whistleblower. The lawyers want the definers of English to replace negative synonyms like betrayer, fink, and snitch with uplifting ones like watchdog, truthteller, and fraud-buster. All these negatives “mean fewer people coming forward to protect us when they see something wrong.” And that, in turn, means fewer whistleblowers fired, disciplined, or fleeing to Russia, which equals fewer clients for the firm. Yet that old school-yard mentality of “nobody likes a snitch” persists. Histleblowers are increasingly stepping forward on behalf of the public good. LotsOfWords knows 480,000 words.A law firm that specializes in defending whistleblowers has started a petition on to persuade dictionaries and thesauruses to ditch their derogatory synonyms for whistleblower in favor of positive terms: ![]() National Scrabble Association, and the Collins Scrabble Words used in the UK (about 180,000 words each). ![]() ![]() The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) from Merriam-Webster, the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OTCWL / OWL / TWL) from the Please note: the Wiktionary contains many more words - in particular proper nouns and inflected forms: plurals of nouns and past tense of verbs - than other English language dictionaries such as Words and their definitions are from the free English dictionary Wiktionary published under the free licenceĬreative Commons attribution share-alike. Potential litterature) such as lipograms, pangrams, anagrams, univocalics, uniconsonantics etc. To play Scrabble, Words With Friends, hangman, the longest word, and forĬreative writing: rhymes search for poetry, and words that satisfy constraints from the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo: workshop of You can use it for many word games: to create or to solve crosswords, arrowords (crosswords with arrows), word puzzles, Lots of Words is a word search engine to search words that match constraints (containing or not containing certain letters, starting or ending letters, ![]()
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