- #Gay definition in dictionary manual
- #Gay definition in dictionary code
- #Gay definition in dictionary series
The first definition of gay in the Oxford dictionary is: adjective (of a person) homosexual (used especially of a man), though Rao clarifies that gay is not gender specific, as lesbian is. “The mistake was caused by the site’s editorial filter, which changed the athlete’s last name automatically - in keeping with the outlet’s policy against running stories that use the term ‘gay’, replacing it with ‘homosexual’ instead.” According to the Washington Post article. Today, though gay has become synonymous with homosexual, the Washington Post in 2017 published an article on whether social perceptions about the two are really the same, after a news website reportedly published an article with the headline “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials’, following Olympian Tyson Gay’s qualification for the 100-metre run final. “In Bombay for example, the LGBTQ community uses the word ‘ghodi’ to mean a plainclothes policeman,” he explains. The LGBTQ have their own vocabulary, one that often varies from city to city, and has taken on regular words that mean something quite different when applied to themselves or used within the community, says Ashok Row Kavi. “While the conventional meaning of queer is weird, and it is a discriminatory term in itself, the community has been using it as an identity,” he points out. The same way that ‘queer’ would be used, later on,” he adds. “It was a subversion of the established vocabulary by the community. Ever since Stonewall, sexual politics had come into play and identifying as gay was a way for the community to be a part of that politics,” says Rao. ““Whereas homosexuality is just a word denoting a sexual preference or tendency and used derogatorily, gay is an identity.
#Gay definition in dictionary manual
As an article on the website of The New England Journal of Medicine mentions, it was only in 1980 that homosexuality was deleted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, thus changing the view that it was a behavioural disorder. Globally, the community preferred gay to homosexual, says Tellis, because the latter had a negative feel to it – it was a more clinical term, suggestive of a medical condition.
![gay definition in dictionary gay definition in dictionary](https://cdn.dnaindia.com/sites/default/files/styles/full/public/2017/05/21/577224-gay-lingo-052217.jpg)
In India, while Tellis says the use of the word gay to mean homosexuals started in the 1970s and ’80s with Indian men who travelled to the West and came back, Rao and writer Hoshang Merchant say the word started getting used here in the 1990s after the setting up of Bombay Dost, the country’s first LGBT magazine, by activist Ashok Row Kavi. In the beginning, gay was also an acronym for ‘Good As You’.”
![gay definition in dictionary gay definition in dictionary](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41oH7phf+kL._AC_.jpg)
It was around this time that the community started using the word gay to identify itself.
![gay definition in dictionary gay definition in dictionary](https://149359564.v2.pressablecdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/131114_apple_gay.png)
#Gay definition in dictionary series
R Raj Rao, writer and professor of English at Pune University, adds: “The Stonewall Riots (a series of violent confrontations between members of the LGBT community and the police in New York in 1969) are the beginning of most gay-rights movements in the world.
#Gay definition in dictionary code
While some books and websites on the history of the global homosexual movement claim the word gay was used as a secret code by homosexuals to identify themselves even as far back as the early twentieth century, professor Ashley Tellis says “it was in the 1960s that the word came to be popularly associated with the community”. According to both dictionaries, in English the use of ‘gay’ to mean happy, excited, merry, carefree or bright started in the Middle English period that stretches between the 12th and the 16th century. Merriam Webster takes it further back to a Germanic origin “akin to the Old High German Gahi” that meant “quick or sudden”. The Oxford English dictionary traces the history of the word ‘gay’ to the French word Gai.
![gay definition in dictionary gay definition in dictionary](https://kidshelpline.com.au/sites/default/files/thumbnail_T_LGBTIQA.png)
But while Nandy’s choice of word was bang on that day, how did a word that had originally meant light-hearted, carefree or cheerful, become associated with a community whose life has been often been anything but? “I am so Gay today…” he wrote in a coming-out post that has since gone viral. On Thursday, as the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexuality, reading down the controversial British-era section 377 of the penal code, Mumbai-based Arnab Nandy took to social media to express his joy, as many across the country and the world were doing.