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NEWS: Yuri Manga in Publishers Weekly

Because of its content, says Australian manga artist Queenie Chan, "Yuri can be aimed at men, girls, women and lesbians."

I am somewhat disturbed by even the publishers using thet erms yaoi and yuri. From my understanding, those terms are meant to mean the more pornographic same sex stories.
-Xenos

Much like the term otaku, yuri, although originally a Japanese loanword, has undergone significant semantic drift. The precise difference between "yuri" and "shōjo-ai"' ranges from large to none, depending on the speaker.

In Japanese, the term is typically used to mean any lesbian content in entertainment media, whether sexual or romantic, explicit or implied. For example, Futaba Channel's "yuri" board includes both hentai and non-hentai content rather than separating them. The term shōjo-ai is not usually found in this context outside of Western fandom. Neither term is generally used by Japanese lesbians describing themselves.

American use of yuri has broadened in recent years, picking up connotations from the Japanese use, but the historical usage differed: in America, yuri has typically been used to denote only the most explicit end of the spectrum, being effectively a variety of hentai; while shōjo-ai — an independently-coined term, following the logical connection to shōnen-ai — described anything without explicit sex. The term likely stayed popular because many fans wanted to remove the direct connotation of pure pornography, which is still often associated with anime as a whole in some circles.

On the Internet, "shōjo-ai" is sometimes used instead of "yuri" solely because the latter produces too much unrelated material in search engines.

The term is often used in a general way to refer to male-male sexual or romantic content anywhere in anime, manga and fan fiction based on these; usually of a more sexually explicit nature than the now-obsolete shōnen-ai.