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Campaigners fighting to have the term “Essex girl” removed from the Oxford English Dictionary have secured a meeting with its publishers.

More than 3,000 people have signed a petition started by former City workers Juliet Thomas, 32, and Natasha Sawkins, 34, calling for the definition to be taken out.

The term entered the OED in 1997 and is defined as “a supposed type of young woman ... variously characterized as unintelligent, promiscuous, and materialistic”.

The Collins Dictionary defines an Essex girl as: “A young working class woman from the Essex area, typically considered as being unintelligent, materialistic, devoid of taste, and sexually promiscuous.”

Mrs Thomas and Mrs Sawkins, both former Bloomberg executives who moved to Essex five and nine years ago respectively, launched the online campaign to challenge the “lazy, tired stereotype”.

After it went viral, bosses at the OED promised to re-examine the entry when or if there is evidence suggesting a new definition is needed.

Mrs Thomas said: “We are so pleased that the petition has sparked a conversation around the outdated derogatory ‘Essex girl’ stereotype and dictionary definitions.

"We are now in an open dialogue with Oxford Dictionaries and will be meeting with the head of marketing tomorrow to discuss the campaign.”

Mrs Sawkins added: “We will be looking at how usage of the term has changed to mean something more positive.

"We also want to highlight the fact that ‘Essex girl’ is frequently used simply to mean ‘a girl who lives in or comes from Essex’.”

In recent years, the term has also come to be associated with figures such as Amy Childs, star of The Only Way Is Essex.

Mrs Thomas and Mrs Sawkins said: “We want the definitions removed. Or, at the very least, made obsolete. And we know that, to do this, Essex needs to reclaim ‘Essex girl’ — to let the world know that it doesn’t signify anything other than a girl who lives in Essex.”

A spokeswoman for Oxford University Press, which publishes the OED, said it does not exclude offensive or vulgar terms “as they are as much a part of the language as any other words”.

She added: “We can’t make changes as a result of a petition as this would go against our descriptive editorial policy.”

But she said: “Keeping our dictionaries up-to-date and identifying changes to prioritise for investigation is a huge task and we always appreciate it when people highlight words where they believe usage is changing.

“‘Essex Girl’ being highlighted to us means we can continue to monitor the corpus closely and will spot when the evidence begins to suggest a new definition is needed.”