The Macquarie Word Genius Reference Library

It is less than twenty years since David Crystal 'prophesied' that "one day we shall not look up a word in a dictionary on a shelf but ask our home computer for the information we need" (Crystal, 1987, 111). And now, super-compressed, in one package are the Macquarie Dictionary, the Macquarie Thesaurus and the Macquarie Australian Spellchecker. In the same article in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Crystal listed twenty questions to ask when you buy a dictionary; I will refer to many of them for this review. Although the first two are strictly book-oriented and therefore passé for our purposes – hard-wearing paper and a binding that opens flat, Word Genius is still pre-occupied with 'wear'. The publicity promises that the electronic version 'won't wear out'. This seems rather pointless. In today's newspaper, for example, there are words that are not yet in the Word Genius word list. 'AWB' is not there, and nor is 'Abu Ghraib'. The good thing about electronic versions of dictionaries is surely that they are much more readily revised than print ones and we can therefore expect a cheap update soon.