| Macquarie Dictionary | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | S Butler (editor) |
| Country | Australia |
| Language | Australian English |
| Subject(s) | Dictionary |
| Publisher | Macquarie Dictionary Publishers |
| Publication date | 1981, 1991, 1997, 2005, 2009 |
| Pages | 1676 (5th edition: 1940) |
| ISBN | ISBN 1-876429-14-3 (5th edition: 9781876429669) |
The Macquarie Dictionary is a dictionary of Australian English. It also pays considerable attention to New Zealand English. Originally it was a publishing project of Jacaranda Press, a Brisbane educational publisher, for which an editorial committee was formed, largely from the Linguistics department of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. It is published by Macquarie Dictionary Publishers Pty Ltd, a company specifically established for the task, currently owned by Macmillan Publishers. In October 2006 it moved away from Macquarie University to the University of Sydney where it is located in Fisher Library. It is notable for its extensive inclusion of encyclopaedic content: a great many proper names, particularly of Australian people and places, are included.
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The original version of the Macquarie Dictionary was based on Hamlyn's Encyclopedic World Dictionary of 1971, which in turn was based on Random House's American College Dictionary of 1947, which itself was based on the 1927 New Century Dictionary.
Since its first publication, in 1981, it has been progressively adopted by Australian schools, businesses and courts as their standard dictionary.
The second edition was published in 1991 and it introduced encyclopaedic content to many entries. The third edition, published in 1997, made use of an inhouse corpus of Australian writing, Ozcorp, to add a large number of examples of Australian usage, to give some of the flavour of an historical dictionary. This edition also gave a good coverage of English in Asia. The fourth edition, published in 2005, increases the number of citations, includes etymologies for many phrases and pays particular attention to Australian regionalisms. The fifth edition was published in October 2009 and places particular emphasis on words relating to the environment and climate change.
The dictionary records standard Australian English spelling, which is closer to British and Canadian English than American English, with spellings like colour, centre, defence and practice/practise (noun/verb). It gives -ise spellings first, listing -ize spellings as acceptable variants, unlike the Oxford English Dictionary and some other dictionaries of British English, that continue to prefer -ize to -ise in spite of the opposite tendency amongst the British general public (see Oxford spelling).
A number of smaller versions are available, including a pocket edition, as well as companion volumes such as a thesaurus. An online subscription-based version is also available. The latest edition of the main complete version of the Macquarie Dictionary is the fifth, which was published in 2009. The Macquarie Australian Slang Dictionary published in 2004 is an up-to-date record of Australian slang. The Concise Dictionary is available as an iPhone application, from mobile phones, and as an e-book to online dictionary subscribers.
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