The Macquarie Dictionary was first published with great fanfare in 1981. Three years later, the publishers, Macquarie Library, since taken over by Macmillan, issued an offshoot of the main dictionary bearing the twee marketing-driven title Aussie Talk. The more formal explanatory subtitle, The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, gave a clearer idea of the scope of the book and also revealed that it was intended to compete with Professor Gerry Wilkes’s very successful Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, which had been published in 1978. A revised edition of Aussie Talk came out in 1988, retitled The Macquarie Dictionary of Australian Colloquial Language. A third edition was published in 1996, rebadged as the Macquarie Book of Slang, with the somewhat redundant subtitle Australian Slang in the 90s. Now in 2004 another edition of the work has again been renamed, Macquarie Australian Slang Dictionary, which we are told on the front and back cover and on the title page is ‘complete & unabridged’.