History
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 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 on October 2009 and places particular emphasis on words relating to the environment and climate change.
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