My father was trained as a journalist in the days when newspapers cared about their reputations as disseminators of information that was accurate and reliable. It wasn’t just a legal anxiety, it was an organisational pride in the quality of their news reporting. He told me that you can’t half-know something. You either know it or you don’t. Read more…
Lewis Carroll contributed some of the most inspirational writing in history to the world. With his remarkable manipulation of language, he captured the imaginations not only of children, but of aspiring writers, readers and everyone else who came in contact with his word. Read more…
Here at the Macquarie Dictionary, we have maintained our card catalogue from the early 1980s. It’s in more or less pristine condition, and contained within are hundreds of thousands of original words and definitions from the very first edition of our dictionary. Read more…
The Committee’s Choice for the 2016 word of the Year goes to fake news. Honourable mentions go to enby and halal snack pack.
Do you agree or disagree with the Committee? Have your say and vote now!
Here at Macquarie Dictionary, we like to let the year end completely before we make a decision on which word to crown Word of the Year. We have a basic policy that all the candidates are drawn from words which have been selected and researched and written into the dictionary during the year… Read more…
A thesaurus is a treasure trove of new words for you to discover. More people write now than ever before, whether it be in messages, emails, articles, stories, or anything else. It’s important to keep the mind sharp and the vocabulary growing and one of the many ways to do this is to utilise a thesaurus…. Read more…
Many words have more than one definition, and these are listed in each entry numerically. But is there any order to this or is it organised chaos? In this case, thankfully, there are specific rules for how definitions are ordered. In a word such as joke or kangaroo or any word where there are multiple meanings, the following applies… Read more…
Counting down from popularity, here’s what you and the rest of Australia (and the world) wanted to know about in 2016. Read more…
The English language has the capacity to create new forms, often by fusing two existing words to create one word with a new meaning, such as gasbag or chinwag. This is by far the most common way of expanding our lexicon. Read more…
Recently I gave a talk at Nunawading Library in Melbourne. The discussion afterwards was on various current usage problems, including the use of the word literally as a marker of emphasis with no real meaning but a functionality that seems to be much enjoyed by many people in spoken and written language… Read more…
