EPA glossaries: The struggle to define environmental terms

As the nation's principal environmental agency, the EPA is responsible for conveying a wide array of information to the American public. The agency utilizes glossaries, lexicons, dictionaries, and thesauri to define environmental terms, regulations, scientific concepts, and issues. However, the approach taken to defining environmental terms is challenging and there is often more than one definition for the same term. This article examines how the EPA defines environmental terms and how it can be difficult to choose the most appropriate definition or environmental term.