First, some history. In 1997, Oxford University Press published The Dictionary of New Zealand English: A dictionary of New Zealandisms on historical principles – 2.6kg and 965 pages, edited by HW (Harry)
Orsman. It recorded “the history of words and particular senses of words which are in some way distinctively or predominantly …
‘New Zealand’ in meaning or use.” Historical principles meant it gave examples of the earliest use of words and their developing shades of meaning over time.
Nothing like it had been seen before. Nor has been again. The dictionary was never revised or republished.
There was some comfort to be had eight years later with the publication of The New Zealand Oxford Dictionary – 2.6kg and 1355 pages, also from OUP, and edited by Tony Deverson and Graeme Kennedy. Compiled at the New Zealand Dictionary Centre, based at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, it built on Orsman’s work but was general in scope rather than confined to New Zealandisms, and included encyclopaedia-type entries. The last reprint of that was in 2012.
Since then, nothing. There is currently no single source of information on the full range of New Zealand English – which now, of course, includes many words from te reo Māori in daily use. No one is attempting to collect in one place all the new words that enter the language. For want of a dictionary, the stock reply to someone wanting to know the meaning of a word will be, no surprise, “Just Google it.”
Which is okay, but … “You normally get the most common meaning, which often doesn’t help, because words have many different senses and can be polysemous,” says John Macalister, an emeritus professor, at Victoria’s school of linguistics and applied language studies. “The citations [in a dictionary like Orsman’s] are almost like a mini history lesson, and they show changes of use over time, they show etymology, they can show
