‘Elderly’ or ‘older’? Advocates and a dictionary address language on aging.

Experts in the field of aging get frustrated with terms like “senior” and “elderly” commonly used to describe a diverse cast of characters as likely to be in a wheelchair as climbing a mountain.

Now, they have one of the world’s major dictionaries ready to change one important age-related reference.

That lexical undercurrent was at play this week as more than 4,000 researchers, social scientists, and others concerned with the issues of aging gathered here to talk about themes of loneliness, dementia, Medicare, and ... Donald Trump (as in, what last week’s presidential victory bodes for all these issues).

Threading throughout the annual scientific conference of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) is attention to the impact of more prosaic use of words. Sessions examined the effects of terminology, including a study scouring 62 million posts on the social media platform X for stigma-inducing ageist terms; a ChatGPT analysis of ageist words in 2024 presidential election news coverage; and a look at words used in children’s books and media portrayals of older characters (finding they’re either loving or “no fun” and “crabby,” nothing in between).

But what capped it all off was the GSA-led effort last month asking the world’s most influential dictionaries to make changes.

“We’re trying to change culture,” explains Patricia D’Antonio, executive director of the GSA’s National Center to Reframe Aging. “How we communicate about aging,” she says, can drive stereotypical perceptions of older people, from “Everybody’s in a nursing home” to “Everybody’s retired and on a cruise” – while missing the reality of diversity in between.

Ms. D’Antonio wrote letters asking the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Merriam-Webster to tweak their definitions of “ageism” – which both described the term as age discrimination, especially aimed at “the elderly.” The aging experts asked to change that to “older people” – a broader, more inclusive definition.

The OED responded in a week, agreeing that “elderly” – once considered a polite euphemism for “old” – had taken on associations of infirmity. But the editors also noted that “older people” is a comparative term that prompts the question “Older than whom?” (Merriam-Webster has not responded.)

Still, the OED concluded, “Having re-examined the evidence, we agree that the current OED definition can be improved. A future version is likely to refer to the discriminatory treatment of people because they are considered too old, rather than because they are ‘elderly’.”

That victory represents “a small change,” says Ms. D’Antonio. “But we know that if we make people aware, [biases] will start to change.” It follows her successful campaign in 2019 and 2020 to get The Associated Press, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association to accept National Center to Reframe Aging guidance for age-related language in their style manuals.

OED senior editor Fiona McPherson cautions that while the gerontologists may be trying to raise awareness, “It’s not a dictionary’s role to drive language change; it’s ... to reflect and to show that the language has changed.

“We’re descriptive ... not prescriptive,’’ she adds. “We’re not telling you how to use words. We’re telling you how you use words.”

How conference exhibitor Wamis Singhatat uses words changed swiftly nine years ago when he started working with medical doctors and older people to create the Tango Belt, a device that protects hips by deploying airbags in case of falls. Working alongside those doctors influenced his vocabulary changes: “Community not facility, because no one wants to live in a facility. And it’s ‘older adults’ instead of ‘seniors’ or ‘elderly’ or ‘geriatric people.’

“I think the whole rationale behind using this nomenclature is that the quality of life is improving later in your life,” he says, and “elderly” or “senior” doesn’t accurately describe “a 75-year-old today” versus one “20, 30, 40 years ago.”

For her part, Adrianna Acevedo-Fontanez, a young epidemiologist who grew up in Puerto Rico, hasn’t much contemplated terminology. Though she does find the term for older people back home to be lacking nuance: Older people are simply called viejo – old – used bluntly or tenderly depending on intent, she says.

But, here, in English, she says, she tends to use the term “aging individuals.” And then she stops short, smiles at the language tangle she’s in, and adds, “I guess that’s actually not the right word either – we’re all aging, right?”

This article was written with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations, and the Silver Century Foundation. The GSA has no editorial input on journalism produced by The Christian Science Monitor.