The word that dare not speak its name

Is it possible to kill a word?

Many words certainly go unuttered. If you’re a typical English-speaker, you have a vocabulary of roughly 20,000 words, or perhaps 40,000 if you’ve been to university. Yet the OED puts the number of words at over 500,000. That means at least 450,000 English words hardly ever get an airing. But they aren’t dead.

For some people, that’s a pity. They want to kill (I’m not sure of the approved alternative). No doubt the intention behind that excision was good, but some might say it’s the job of a dictionary to provide the meaning of words and phrases whether or not readers find that upsetting.