As one of the endangered breed of mycologists to have maintained an interest in oomycetes, I am compelled to defend the rationale in continuing to refer to these micro-organisms as fungi. This paper is stimulated by recent communications in which my mycological colleagues have, with apparent relish, pointed to what they perceive as inaccurate references to oomycetes as fungi. David Moore (1997) provides a prime example in his review of The Growing Fungus edited by N. A. R. Gow & G. M. Gadd (1995). Moore criticizes the editors for allowing so many pages of their book to be devoted to these micro-organisms, when ‘…Neurospora is probably more closely related to a cow's nose than it is to Saprolegnia’. While a phylogenetic chasm separates the oomycetes from other fungi, I shall argue that it is impractical to restrict the usage of the term fungus to those micro-organisms that qualify as members of the Phylum Fungi (Alexopoulos, Mims & Blackwell, 1996, provide a contemporary overview of fungal systematics). This argument should have been settled by a series of clear-sighted articles published after molecular genetic analyses confirmed the polyphyletic nature of the fungi (Christensen, 1990; Bruns, White & Taylor, 1991; Hawksworth, 1991; Barr, 1992). For example, Donald Barr (1992) suggested that oomycetes are fungi in the colloquial sense of the term and that it is the colloquial sense of the term that will continue to be most meaningful to mycologists. But since the message of these articles was apparently missed by many mycologists, I hope that this note will clarify a practical definition of the fungi that includes the oomycetes but which does not conflict with a natural classification of the Phylum Fungi that excludes them.