Macquarie Dictionary

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.

Unlike its parent, the Concise Macquarie has a regular commercial publisher, and we might suppose that it is a sensible commercial proposition. We might wonder if the reduction from the 77,000 headwords of the bigger dictionary to the over 41000 of this is worth saving the $12 difference in price: but nobody who read my review of the parent Macquarie is likely long to ponder this when he or she remembers that Collins cost’s $19.95.