Update: I’m now collecting signatures for a petition, please see this post for more details, or you can view and sign the petition to the right of this post.

A good way to make an introvert angry is to use the terms introvert and shy interchangeably. But that’s exactly what three prominent online dictionaries have done (I have links to their contact page halfway through this article).

Introversion and shyness are not the same thing. At all. An introvert’s and a shy person’s behavior are the result of different motivations. Introverts are commonly defined as people who need to be alone in order to recharge their energy. Shyness on the other hand is rooted in fear, particularly the fear of negative reactions during social situations. And to treat both terms as meaning the same thing would be to discount all of the shy extroverts out there, people who really want to join big groups and be around people a lot, but who often don’t put themselves in social situations because of fear.

If introvert and shy are used interchangeably the terms stop being useful, which is why I strongly encourage you to contact the following dictionaries and tell them that their definitions are outdated. You can contact dictionary.reference.com here about their definition, Oxford Dictionary here about their definition, and Cambridge here about their definition.

Why should the introvert community care what a dictionary says? Because not everybody is as well informed about introversion as us, and it’s a disservice to both shy people and introverts if we let this misconception continue. Say you have a manager who loves brainstorming sessions. The non-shy extroverts most likely commandeer those meetings (in a typical eight person group, three people do 70 percent of the talking). An introvert and a shy person may mention a few ideas, but not necessarily their best ideas. Introverts can bring their best ideas to the brainstorming session if they have a bit of time to think about it beforehand (extroverts think while they talk, introverts often prefer to think before they talk). To get a shy person’s best input, a method for submitting anonymous ideas would be best. But if introvert is defined as shy, an extrovert manager may refuse to tell us the topic of the brainstorming session beforehand. In their eyes we wouldn’t need time to think beforehand, we would just need to stop being shy.

If we want to become a society where we can value the strengths of introverts, extroverts, and shy people, we need to first make sure that the terms aren’t defined in a totally incorrect way.

And let me know – either by commenting, sending me an email, or tweeting – why this is important to you. I’ll compile some of the responses into a blog post.

Introverts unite!