Sexism “Available” at Turkish Language Institute

The controversy over the definition of the word “available” on Turkish Language Institute (TDK) online dictionary resumes in Turkey as women’s rights activists came up with more entries including “bad woman” and “man”. 

It turned out that the definition for the word “free” also comes up with the usage “promiscuous (woman)”. The expression for “bad woman”, on the other hand, turned out to be “whore”. TDK dictionary also uses “goods” for the same word. 

Although TDK’s definition for “bad man” is “characters who are found unpopular in movies or lose against good charatcters or antagonist”. 

Another definition marked “scrubber” to define women “who are easily obtainable”, while another definition for the word “man” turned out to be “trustworthy, brave”. Lastly, the word “woman” is defined as “those who have skills in motherhood or home administration”. 

59K urge removal of sexist definitions 

On the other hand, TDK released a statement yesterday, announcing that the word “available” was taken to the dictionary in 1983 and they would launch an update in the dictionary soon. 

A campaign has been launched on Change.org for TDK to remove the definition of available was signed by over 58,888K users as of today at 12:27pm local time. (EA/BM)

* bianet refers to Cumhuriyet newspaper in the writing of this article. 

* Click here to read the article in Turkish.