It was intended to be a lighthearted quest to find the least popular word in the English language, but only a day after it launched, Oxford Dictionaries has ended its search following “severe misuse” of the feature by visitors to their website.

The dictionary publisher had invited users around the world to name their least favourite English word, intending to highlight differences between countries, genders and ages. When it opened for submissions on Thursday, “moist” was an early contender to top lists in the UK, US and Australia. It was later overtaken by “Brexit”, which went on to head the UK’s list, with “British” in third place.

But the #OneWordMap feature has now been closed, with a notice blaming the shutdown on “severe misuse”.

The dictionary publisher did not expand on which words had caused the shutdown, saying only that it was “a mixture of swearwords and religiously offensive” vocabulary. Posts on Twitter suggest that some users’ picks for their least favourite words included “Islam” and “Israel”.

Dan Stewart, head of international marketing at Oxford Dictionaries, said the publisher had “filtered out words marked as vulgar and offensive in our dictionaries, but this wasn’t enough to prevent the misuse which led to the results being unusable”.

He added: “Yesterday, we launched an initiative on oxforddictionaries.com, #OneWordMap, which was intended as a way to encourage a positive engagement with language. Unfortunately, and despite our attempts to prevent negative behaviour on this site, we have had to take down the site. Whilst this is disappointing, we strongly believe in the importance of engaging with the wider community to enhance our understanding of the English language, and will continue to investigate ways of doing so.”