Unlike its parent, the Concise Macquarie has a regular commercial publisher, and we might suppose that it is a sensible commercial proposition. We might wonder if the reduction from the 77,000 headwords of the bigger dictionary to the over 41000 of this is worth saving the $12 difference in price: but nobody who read my review of the parent Macquarie is likely long to ponder this when he or she remembers that Collins cost’s $19.95.

In these circumstances, it seems irrelevant carefully to account the truncations made in this edition: there are fewer worse judged to be archaic, fewer words from further branches of learning, fewer colloquialisms (especially perhaps the ephemeral: that pearl of Sydney lexicographers, the ‘onion’ in the gang-bang has gone; more surprisingly, so has the ‘gang-bang’).