Kellyanne Conway at CPAC 2017
White House Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway was interviewed by Mercedes Schlapp during the first day of the Conservative Political Action Conference on 23 February 2017 Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Merriam-Webster dictionary reacted to Kellyanne Conway's comments on feminism made at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on 23 February.

After seeing a surge of searches for the term "feminism", Merriam-Webster published a post highlighting that the definition of the word simply refers to "the belief that men and women have equal rights and opportunities" and to "organized activity in support of women's rights and interests."

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Speaking at the conference, the White House Counselor to the President called for equal pay for women, but opposed to the "classic" notion of feminism, which she defined as "anti-male" and "pro-abortion".

"It's difficult for me to call myself a feminist in the classic sense because it seems to be very anti-male and it certainly is very pro-abortion, in this context," Conway said.

Defining her own brand of feminism, she said: "There's an individual feminism, if you will, that you make your own choices... I look at myself as a product of my choices, not a victim of my circumstances. That's really to me what conservative feminism, if you will, is all about."

Along with offering words of the day, the dictionary editors have begun writing articles addressing the definition of terms receiving a surge in searches on their websites. These are usually related to current affairs or statements by President Donald Trump and/or people in his administration.

In the past few weeks, the website has registered an increase in searches for words such as "anti-Semitism", in relation to Trump's response to threats against Jewish centres, "immigrant" in occasion of the "day without immigrants" initiative and "democracy", after the Washington Post adopted a slogan underneath its masthead, saying "democracy dies in darkness".

Also on 23 February, the dictionary published a post on the meaning of the word "military" following comments made by White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who claimed that when Trump said deportations would be called deportations "a military operation," he didn't mean "an operation conducted by the military." He said instead that the president was using the word "as an adjective".

Merriam-Webster observed that, while "military" can be used as an adjective, its meaning does not change. "Military is indeed an adjective," the editors explained "[But] despite being used in the phrase military precision, military is not a synonym of precision."