Lisa Saunders, a mother-of-four from Northern Ireland, was horrified to discover the number of words associated with Christianity that are missing from the latest edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

Words like "aisle", "chapel", "bishop", "disciple", "sin" "minister", and "devil", have been dropped in favour of "blog", "MP3 player", "democratic", and "celebrity", in the 2007 edition of the children's dictionary. According to a story in The Telegraph, she first realised the words were missing when she couldn't find "moss" and "fern," while helping her son with his homework.

When she began to compare with earlier editions she was completely horrified by the vast number of words which havd been removed. "We know that language moves on and we can't be fuddy-duddy about it but you don't cull hundreds of important words in order to get in a different set of ICT words" she told The Telegraph.

According to Vineeta Gupta, head of children's dictionaries at Oxford University Press, the changes were made to reflect a "multicultural" society. "People don't go to church as often as before. Our understanding of religion is within multiculturalism, which is why some words such as 'Pentecost' or 'Whitsun' would have been in 20 years ago but not now," he said.

In the Beliefnet Crunchy Con blog Erin Manning described the decision by OUP to discontinue particular words as a form of "verbal engineering". Manning cited Catholic moral theologian William Smith as saying, "All social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering."

"Deciding to drop a word that has already fallen out of use, become obsolete, from a dictionary is not a political act," said Manning, "but removing words still in everyday use just because you've decided they ought not be important in the vocabulary of a modern child most decidedly is."