Also, I don't think any definition of "gay woman" wore saffron coloured robes in Victorian Britain, this is a Classical reference.

"The followers of the so-called Krokotos Painter, whose name is derived from the Greek κροκωτός (krokōtos) (saffron-yellow dress robe). The female figures in his work often wear krokōtoi" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theseus_Painter

See also: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG59070

They could replace fop with another word that is not pejorative, but why completely remove it?

It's not the actual problem, it's just irrelevant. The reference doesn't make sense to describe the actual kind of shoe. The original description doesn't provide a real distinction about the sandal in question, if there ever was one. The authors seem to have concluded from the works, that it was merely a sandal and that nothing points one way or another about its nature.

Edit,

My reading of the original entry was that it doesn't describe what sandal an ancient Greek equivalent of 'fop' used.

The entry then, must have described an 18th-19th century contemporary feature.

> My reading of the original entry was that it doesn't describe what sandal an ancient Greek equivalent of 'fop' used.

Sure, if that's the case then it doesn't make sense to keep the reference. My reading was that it referred to classical fops.

A dictionary is supposed to clarify meaning. How many people know what the meaning of fop is these days? It’s not very common in books these days. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Fop&year_start...

A synonym for fop in that article is macaroni. If the entry said “a sandal worn by macaroni” it would be extremely confusing for a modern reader.

> How many people know what the meaning of fop is these days?

Yep. the issue seems to be that while Ancient Greek is a dead language, English is a moving target. Since 1889, words like "fop" fall out of favour, words like "gay" acquire a secondary meaning (edit, actually another secondary meaning) that in time replaces the original primary one, changing the reader's perception of a definition.

> How many people know what the meaning of fop is these days?

I don't know. I do, and I'm not a native speaker. And people using Greek dictionaries probably skew towards being pretty well read.

But that's besides the point, since I suggested using some other word if they found "fop" offensive.

The full sentence describing the editing in the article starts with “antiquated and offensive language”, which one might interpret to mean the removed words were both of those things, or one could also interpret that antiquated language and offensive language were removed as two possibly overlapping sets.

The point of the dictionary is to use “contemporary English” since it’s used as a reference in schools. I’ve definitely seen “fop” before but in high school I wouldn’t say it’s something that I could remember without looking it up in a second dictionary, so it’s not that useful of a defining term. All this offensive or nonoffensive is mountains out of a molehill.

Again, my suggestion was to use different words, instead of just removing them.