dictionary
Nick Hudson
TheAustralian Oxford Dictionary
OUP $79.95hb, 1597pp, 0 19 550793 2
THUMP! ANOTHER HUGE AUSTRALIAN dictionary lands on my desk. Thirty years ago, this reaction to the arrival of a huge Australian dictionary would have been impossible, because there were no Australian dictionaries, huge or otherwise, in existence. When the first ones appeared, the reviewers concentrated their attention on the scope and accuracy of the 'Australian content', which was widely interpreted as Australian slang.
Today, we can put the latest one, the Australian Oxford Dictionary (AOD), on a stack of progenitors and competitors. We can take it as read that the key Australian words and idioms will be there, and can start looking at broader issues. What sort of dictionary is it? Is this the sort of dictionary I want? How does it compare with its most obvious competitor, the Macquarie Dictionary?
First, the physical: the AOD has fewer but larger pages, set in three columns against two, giving the two dictionaries much the same word count. The Macquarie has more headwords, partly through having more encyclopedic entries, but largely because it treats compound words (for example, 'machine-readable') as discrete headwords. The AOD treats them as subheads (eg under 'machine'). The AOD also has a whisker of extra leading between entries. To my eye, the clumping of the derivatives and the extra space give the AOD the edge in readability.
Both dictionaries are 'encyclopaedic', which essentially means that they include proper nouns and their word families. I find this wholly admirable, and I doubt whether any dictionary user would feel otherwise. However, this is the modern way: the AOD is merely catching up with the pack.
Is the encyclopaedic content good? In general, the AOD has fewer but longer entries than the Macquarie. If all I want to know is the full name and dates of birth and death of some famous person (which is all I generally seek of a general dictionary) the Macquarie gives me this information about a lot more people. But if I want, say, a list of an author's works (another reasonably frequent demand), the AOD is more likely to be helpful. Perhaps the Macquarie wins by a short head.
The AOD lists the various meanings of a word in order of frequency of current use, not, as was the Oxford tradition, 'on historical principles' (i.e. in chronological order of first recorded usage). Here, again, Oxford is running with the pack, but this is a change I regret. Roughly a third of my appeals to a dictionary (serious appeals, that is) concern historical questions: for example, when and how did the word 'second' come to mean 'one sixtieth of a minute'? I have to keep an old 'historical principles' dictionary on hand for this purpose.
However, this point is also relevant to some more general questions. For example, it seems likely that anyone who looks up 'car' does so because they want to see how the various meanings are related. What they need is an audit trail, showing how an original core meaning has evolved over time into the various meanings we know today -- the `historical principles'.
Furthermore (and this is a purely practical point), 'historical principles' give us an order which is reasonably objective and unchanging. Frequency will vary according to time and place. The lexicographer is therefore obliged to make some very subjective decisions. For example, which of the many meanings of 'station' should come first? The AOD leads with railway stations, while the Macquarie has '1. A position assigned for standing...' which seems to me like a very desirable (and rare) retreat into historical principles, since it is not often used this way.
The AOD is unashamedly based on British originals. Where Australian usage is clearly different from British, as in the case of 'lorries' and 'trucks', the adaptation has been made very well. What cannot be done so easily is to change the order of events within the entries. As a result, Australian usages tend to be tacked on at the end. To take a very simple example, in British English a 'dam' is a wall which contains a body of water. In Australian English, it is more often (for my money) the body of water, the container being a 'dam-wall'. Thus, the Brits fall off dams, whereas we fall into them. Frequency would, I believe, demand that the AOD had the 'body of water' meaning in the first slot. But it isn't. The wall comes first.