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.
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