Growing out of the 'Racial slurs in quotations' thread, I would relate the following:~

Some years ago, I wrote to Collins Dictionary, one of the most highly regarded of the standard available one-volume dictionaries [tho I greatly prefer Chambers myself], asking why their entry for the word "Jew" made no reference, even with some such get-out addition as 'non-acceptable' or 'offensive' or 'obsolete', to the indisputable & unavoidable fact that the word was used for many years, as a verb to mean 'to cheat or overreach, esp financially', and as a noun to mean 'a miser or skinflint'. {My impression BTW is that the verbal usage has disappeared, tho I recall hearing it in my lifetime, during my 1950s National Service; but I have come across the noun still in use quite recently, on the lips of quite a close acquaintance who didn't happen to know my origins [see below*]. I was so astonished & taken aback that I failed to make any reply, on which my late wife later expressed her relief ~ on the whole!}.

Surely, I said in my letter to the editors of Collins, the function of a dictionary is to record what a word means, in any of the usages which exist or have existed, rather than to record what the editors think it ought to mean. I received a reply from the executive responsible for definitions to the effect that I was quite right, he couldn't imagine how such an oversight could have occurred, I could be assured it would be corrected and the definition appropriately expanded in the next edition...

It wasn't. No such emendation has occurred.

I still think it should have done. What do others think on this?

~Michael~

{*I should perhaps add, for any who didn't know, that I myself, though a baptised and confirmed Anglican who has now returned to his default atheist setting, was born to Jewish parents & thus brought up & had the usual introduction to the faith at age 13 &c. ~M~}