A teenager who was fed up with a dictionary which defined nude as "having the colour of a white person's skin" has successfully campaigned to have the definition changed.
Luis Torres, a student from Ithaca in Connecticut, US, set up a campaign on DoSomething.org to pressure Mirriam-Webster into action.
Torres' campaign page with the dictionary's former definition
The dictionary now defines nude as "lacking something essential especially to legal validity," "devoid of a natural or conventional covering," "featuring nudes" or "frequented by naked people".
Posting on his campaign page, the student said: "Up until August 2015, Merriam-Webster was the only dictionary that defined nude as "having the color of a white person's skin." But you all changed that! On National Nude Day, 820 of you flooded Merriam-Webster's online dictionary with comments to remove their racist definition of the word "nude" and THEY CHANGED IT.
"HUGE shoutout to everyone who participated, especially these rockstars who went above and beyond!"
The dictionary's new definition, which appears on the website
Torres' campaign received widespread support around the world, with numerous people tweeting they had no idea the dictionary's definition still existed.
Speaking to student paper The Ithacan about the campaign, Torres explained: "It was just kind of proving that Eurocentric standards of beauty are detrimental to people of color’s self-esteem and confidence.
"I’m very happy with the new definition. I think the new one is super inclusive with broad language. It’s a small microaggression, the word “nude” itself. It’s a manifestation of all the ideas we have as a society.
"As a white person, you might not understand why the word “nude” being defined that way is important, but you have to understand why it might be important to someone with a different perspective."