Macquarie Dictionary

Macquarie Dictionary

The Macquarie Dictionary Sixth Edition
Editor	Susan Butler
Country	Australia
Language	Australian English
Subject	Dictionary
Publisher	Macquarie Dictionary Publishers
Publication date	1981, 1991, 1997, 2005, 2009, 2013
Media type	Print, Digital

The Macquarie Dictionary is a dictionary of Australian English. It is generally held by universities and the legal profession to be the authoritative source on 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 now published by Macquarie Dictionary Publishers an imprint of Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd. In October 2007 it moved its editorial office away from Macquarie University to the University of Sydney.

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 was based on the 1927 New Century Dictionary, which was based on The Imperial Dictionary of the English Language, which itself was based on Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language second edition of 1841.

Since its first publication in 1981, its usage has grown so that over time, it has come to rival longer-established dictionaries from elsewhere in the English-speaking world as a standard authority on the English language within Australia.

The second edition was published in 1991 and it introduced encyclopedic 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.