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Paperback

Lexical Images

The Story of the Australian National Dictionary

W. S. Ramson

$65.95 AUD

ISBN:
9780195515770
Published:
1 Jul 2002
Availability:
Print on demand
Bill Ramson, former Director of The Australian National Dictionary Centre, relates in detail the fascinating and sometimes controversial story behind the making of an Australian icon, The Australian National Dictionary, the first historical dictionary of Australianisms. The book brings to life different aspects of Australia's history by discussing words included in the dictionary, and shows how these words have become part of a distinctively Australian branch of English.

Acknowledgments
Notes on dates, quotations, and references
Introduction
The Great Tradition: James Murray and the OED
Just Another Oxford Dictionary: The Making of the AND (1)
Dreams, Delights, and Downright Drudgery: The Making of the AND (2)
Of Kiwis and Kangaroos: Lessons from Loanwords
Waste Land to Wonderland: The Land and Its Use
Good Man de Queen: Loanwords from Aboriginal Languages
Two Vignettes from the Past: For the Term of a Natural Life and the Golden Handshake
Walkabout: Swagmen or Squatters
Eureka: The Hour of the White, Anglo-Saxon, Australian Male
One Nation, One Language, One World
Word Index
General Index

W. S. Ramson, Lexicographer, taught English at the Australian National University (ANU) from 1961. He published Australian English: An Historical Study of the Vocabulary 1788-1898 in 1966. Ramson was the founding editor of the Macquarie Dictionary(1981) and from the late 1970s he consulted on Australian English with the Oxford English Dictionary project.