The dictionary editor on the criticized sentence: "Unreasonable"

In autumn 2022, a man was sentenced to three years in prison for the rape of a ten-year-old girl.

The sentence, which fell in the Halmstad District Court, was appealed to the Court of Appeal, which acquitted the man. 

The Court of Appeal considered that there was evidence that the man took both in and on the girl's sex, but the judges stuck to what the word Snippa meant.

They used a Swedish dictionary which defined the word as "the external female genital organ".

The dictionary is published by the Swedish Academy, which also publishes the Swedish Academy's dictionary where words are instead defined as "the female genital organ".  

Emma Sköldberg is a professor of the Swedish language and since 2015 the editor-in-chief of the Swedish Dictionary and is also on the editorial board of the Swedish Academy's dictionary.

She believes that there is no consensus on what the word means.

- The problem is that we have a word - snippa - which is an everyday word, it is not a trade word.

There is no consensus on what the word means, says Emma Sköldberg.

"It's unreasonable"

The word "snippa" entered the Swedish Academy's dictionary in 2006, after it was launched as the female genital equivalent of the word "cock".

In the work of defining a new word candidate, the dictionary editors read a large number of texts to obtain evidence for the word's meaning.

- The texts we look at are written for adults and by adults.

It is not certain that children attach exactly the same meaning as an adult does to these words.

You have to remember that, says Emma Sköldberg and continues:

- We do not think that the dictionary definition should be decisive in legal situations.

It is unreasonable.