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 how it’s used, whether it’s historical, whether it’s anachronistic, used humorously, and so on. They can provide an enormous amount of information.”
You can use your computer as your dictionary if you like. Listener books editor Mark Broatch, who is working on a potted history of New Zealand through language, reports that Apple Macs use several sources for their vocabularies: “The dictionary that comes with many computers clearly uses the Oxford English Dictionary as source material. But it often says that words are Australian and New Zealand when they often aren’t but are either strongly one or not at all used in the other, usually in New Zealand.”
There is another option. New Zealand words are still being recorded in the online edition of the “parent” Oxford English Dictionary, though not systematically or with any attempt at completeness. It has recently added after-ball, chur, kaupapa and koha.
That version offers a single username and password that must not be shared – unlike books, which notoriously can have an almost unlimited number of users for a once-only payment– for a subscription price of £56 ($117) a quarter or £100 ($208) a year. It is out of the financial reach of many, and lacks not just the completeness but some of the authority that a dedicated publication originating here would have.
Macalister is a local consultant for the online Oxford. The website also lists Elizabeth Gordon, an English language adjunct associate professor at the University of Canterbury, as a consultant. This was news to her when the Listener asked what her duties involved. “I didn’t even know I was a consultant for the online Oxford dictionary,” she says. “Thanks for letting me know. I can truthfully say I have no duties.”
None of which is much use to schoolchildren, students, parents being used as a homework resource, word lovers, writers, readers and anyone with any interest in the language that is used every day in this country. No publisher, institution, university, government department, private foundation, individual philanthropist or eccentric boffin has taken responsibility for acting as the custodian of our language and keeping an up-to-date record of it.
A proper grown-up country
Imagine the UK without an Oxford English Dictionary. Or the US without Webster’s (first published in 1828 and also available as an app). In Australia, the Macquarie is the standard reference. As with the British and US equivalents, it is still produced regularly in book form. The ninth edition was published last year and included a subscription to online updates in the cover price.
A dictionary, therefore, is widely seen as a sign that a country has its own identity and a culture worthy of the name. “I remember when the Dictionary Centre was established in 1997,” says author Fiona Farrell. “It felt like New Zealand becoming its own place with a unique history that required a unique vocabulary.”
Susy Carryer is head of the English faculty at Auckland’s Diocesan School for Girls and on the subject expert group for the NCEA review. She provides a recent example of that uniqueness: “Covid changed language, and it changed language in New Zealand differently than in England or America [with] the use of our word ‘lockdown’ rather than ‘shelter in place’.” The latter term was widely used in other countries.
“The kids read about shelter in place rather than lockdown, so there’s a dissonance. In some ways, a New Zealand dictionary is almost more needed now, because the understanding of New Zealand English as distinct has become stronger at the very time we stopped documenting that difference.”
Macalister says the reason we need a dictionary is that language is constantly changing and evolving. “And if we don’t catch that change, we lose an understanding of who we are as a nation, and who we are as a culture. When New Zealand finally got its own dictionary, mainly with the Orsman dictionary, it was like saying: ‘Hey, we’re not Australia.’ Australian English is not our English. Australian English is not talking about our society in the way it has evolved and changed over time. The language we use defines the nation. If you don’t have a repository for capturing that information, what are we?”
After 2012, it’s difficult to say. The New Zealand Dictionary Centre, under its second director, Dianne Bardsley, was shut down when she retired that year.
A closed book
“The New Zealand Oxford was funded when people bought dictionaries,” says Macalister. “Every grandparent would buy a dictionary for their grandkids when they started school. And suddenly, that doesn’t happen. So the income from dictionaries just went, like that.”
The economics don’t support publication of a comprehensive dictionary in book form. As Auckland University Press director Sam Elworthy notes: “Dictionaries are often as much institutional creations as publisher creations. It does require both parties working together to make a thing like that happen.” As was the case with the OUP and Victoria University.
This country has always been vulnerable to the shifting priorities of offshore companies, he says. “New Zealand was always having multinationals withdraw. It’s true in the magazine industry, or in the newspaper industry. It’s true in the book publishing industry, too. Oxford was a case of withdrawing back to Australia. As soon as that happens, cultural property just gets abandoned, left at the side of the road.”
Melbourne-based Lee Walker, director of publishing for OUP Australia & New Zealand, says the decision to discontinue physical publication of the New Zealand Oxford Dictionary was pragmatic.
“There was an expectation for such works to also include substantial encyclopaedic content … unlike lexical matter, much encyclopaedic content often quickly dated, even before publication, and coupled with the swift and decisive impact of the internet, such works – which were also laborious to compile and edit as well as costly to publish – were quickly rendered obsolete.
“As the world’s foremost dictionary publishers, Oxford University Press acted presciently and the move to online was highly successful.” If pricey.
Just as there are no dictionaries for grandparents to buy as gifts, there are no adequate versions for teachers and pupils to use in classrooms, which Diocesan’s Carryer, for one, regrets.
“I am very much still wedded to a paper dictionary,” she says. “I think the skills that students get in terms of developing spelling and understanding of word categories and word classes can be done through the use of dictionary work, rather than just looking something up online.”
Nickel and diming
The last person to have a significant official role recording changes to New Zealand English was Bardsley, when she ran the Dictionary Centre.
“It was a fabulous, fabulous job,” says Bardsley, who took over from founding director Graeme Kennedy in 2003. “Most of it was research: searching for early citations, updating our database. I had one part-time assistant. And we annually published a book of research on what was going on in New Zealand English.” There was also input from PhD students whose research was relevant.
The centre, therefore, was not a large complex populated by boffins in white coats carefully curating and collecting citations from vast shelves of books and periodicals, taking in correspondence from contributors to a background of thrumming computers, and with separate divisions for etymology, pronunciation and te reo Māori. It was just Bardsley and a man who came in part-time. “I’m sorry if you thought that we were a huge band of people,” she apologises, superfluously.
When she retired in 2012, Bardsley was not replaced. The NZDC was shut down to save money, though clearly, it didn’t save a lot of it. It was, to use a foreign idiom, a classic case of nickel and diming.
Much has been lost in the years since. Dictionaries don’t just record words coming into a language, they also catch them on the way out as they become obsolete, which is also useful information if you want to make yourself understood. Even in retirement, Bardsley is keeping track: “Our world is changing so much. Because of social media, people are using words globally. We used to refer to someone as a solo mum – that’s derogatory. That’s not happening any more.”
AUP’s Elworthy echoes that sentiment. “I wonder whether our language has become more global with fewer distinctively Kiwi words in our vocabulary as we read more of the New York Times.”
That may be right. Or it may be that not having our own dictionary accelerates this form of globalisation by making it harder to access our own vernacular. Without a dictionary, it’s hard to tell.
The Taniwha in the Lexicon
As George Orwell was often at pains to point out, politicians are prone to give words meanings that suit them, a tendency that must be resisted. A dictionary can be a useful tool for doing this. Take the word “waka”, which Winston Peters insisted means a canoe and nothing but a canoe, whereas a dictionary would have demonstrated quickly that it is widely used by all sorts of people to refer to all sorts of vehicles.
“A dictionary doesn’t just record English words,” says Macalister. “It records Māori words, words of Pacific origin, conceivably words from other language groups that are becoming more important in the country. Because no one’s capturing this, I have no idea, especially in Auckland, whether in local community newspapers, for instance, words from other languages are creeping into daily use.”
Which brings us to the place of te reo Māori. “The huge explosion in the use of te reo in everyday English language has changed the way we speak,” says Carryer. “Having [a dictionary] that incorporates some of that change would be really helpful.”
To see how a contemporary dictionary can work, look no further than Te Aka (maoridictionary.co.nz). Charged with maintaining an up-to-date lexicon of te reo Māori and easily accessible online, it is an adequately resourced, exemplary model of what a dictionary can be in the 21st century.
Diocesan is an upper echelon independent school and widely seen as an establishment institution, but “we were one of the first schools to introduce mātauranga Māori as a compulsory subject from Years 7 to 10,” says Carryer. “Independent schools are educating future leaders, and the school sees it as part of our responsibility to make sure that they have a really good understanding of the country. That’s an example of a long downstream effect of what a dictionary does.”
Māori vocabulary is now used freely by many people who aren’t fluent in te reo.
“I used to hear more commentary on that from my students than I do now,” says Paul Warren, a professor of linguistics at Victoria University. “Students are really accepting of that. There’s very little comment saying, ‘Why is this happening right now? Why can’t we just use English?’ That would be a fairly major change in attitudes.”
For a publisher such as Elworthy, the issues are slightly different but would still be improved by having an authoritative dictionary. “With te reo Māori words in a book, you’re often thinking, what needs defining? And do you define it in brackets or have a glossary in the back?”
And it’s not just a question with te reo Māori parts of the vocabulary. “With poetry, one might find that a lot of our poets are 25 years old and living in multicultural Wellington and probably haven’t heard of ‘smoko’.”
Permanently munted?
There are, of course, still toilers at the linguistic coalface, mining different seams and building on previous work to increase the word-hoard.
“The data hasn’t been lost,” says Macalister. “I’m the OED consultant in New Zealand. I have my own database but I go to the NZDC database as well.”
He describes how all that research was nearly lost forever. “When it was set up, the NZDC had purpose-designed software. When I was head of school, they came to me and said the university is no longer supporting the publicly accessible platform. I don’t blame the university for what happened, because universities have been victims of appalling government funding decisions over two to three decades. But I said, ‘You can’t just close this down. This is a repository of national significance.’ We employed a graduate student to design software that the university was going to support. The IT people said they would support it, but they were assigned new roles and given new projects and it didn’t happen. One of them put time into a work-around and that’s the NZDC database I still access.” Which is why the database is not more generally accessible.
As for getting New Zealand English into the parent Oxford, his job is to respond to their requests: “They send me queries, normally about Māori words, but other words as well.” He does not offer words for inclusion.
A similar system was briefly used for what seems like a lexical outlier – the Collins English Dictionary: New Zealand Edition, 3.3kg, 1902 pages, 2009. Elizabeth Gordon was definitely one of the New Zealand consultants for this.
“In 1998, I got a request sort of out of the blue from Collins, saying: would I like to revise the Collins school dictionary?” When she came on board, the dictionary had only about 24 New Zealand words. That was subsequently put right. The work involved answering queries about the status of words and sending her replies to “someone in Scotland”. Eventually, the commission “just fizzled out. They stopped asking me to do things. My last contact was when they asked me after the Christchurch earthquake about the origins of the word ‘munted’. There was nothing formal. It just stopped happening.”
Which seems to be how things have gone for dictionaries of New Zealand English in general.
Famous last words
What are the options for regaining a dictionary of New Zealand English that can be accessed by all?
No one would reasonably expect a publisher to undertake to produce a hard-copy dictionary of the old model. However, given there is an excellent database of New Zealand English that was maintained up to 2012, the production of an online dictionary including updates seems a real possibility.
“I think it would be fantastic to have the database restored in a way that was publicly accessible and could be maintained,” says Macalister, “because since Dianne [Bardsley] retired, there’s been no one capturing, in any systematic way, language use in the country.”
But who would pay and how much? As we have seen, the NZDC employed an economical 11/2 people. Given it ceased work 12 years ago, there would be some catching up to do, but less work than when Orsman started from scratch. Perhaps a benevolent plutocrat would like to chip in?
“We tried to investigate philanthropic sources, but that didn’t fly,” says Macalister. “I think it really has to be a recognition by official actors – the government – that the language we use is important. And if we don’t capture it, then we lose a sense of our own evolution.”
Estimating the cost of such a project can only be guesswork. A reasonable comparison might be with two excellent online cultural sites still funded by the government through New Zealand On Air: New Zealand On Screen, devoted to recording and preserving our TV and film history, and audioculture.co.nz, which does something similar for music. Together, they receive about $1.6 million a year to carry out their work.
The OUP was not above accepting a handout from the Lottery Grants Board to get Orsman’s dictionary into print. Perhaps a consortium of publishers, with the Lottery Grants Board, Creative New Zealand, Te Papa, the National Library, the Ministry of Culture and Heritage, the Ministry of Education, the country’s universities and other institutions – all of which would benefit from such a project – could be persuaded to contribute a relatively small share of the costs to provide what would certainly be a magnificent and welcome result.
A writer’s view
Fiona Farrell describes her love for dictionaries as a writer, reader and grandmother.
English as spoken in these islands is different from the way it is spoken anywhere else in the world. New Zealand English, like all languages, is unique and alive and, like all live things, it is in a state of constant evolution, producing words and phrases then losing them again. A dictionary is a means of collecting them as they fly, writing them down, remembering them and what they signified about us and how we have lived in these beautiful, painful, contested islands.
I own a New Zealand Oxford Dictionary from the Wellington NZ Dictionary Centre. I love it, too, because it has words like “shufti”. My dad, who’d served in the desert, used army slang from Egypt all his life: he’d say, for instance, if the power went out, “Let’s have a shufti.” It meant, “Take a look.”
We used that dictionary just last night when we were playing Quiddler with the granddaughters. We all cheat like crazy, making up words, and they also know a lot of words I don’t recognise, so checking is constant, both online and in the NZ Dictionary.
Google is useful, but it’s not the only way to record or learn or remember. I don’t like committing absolutely everything to a computer. I like dictionaries. Big solid books. When I won my first short story competition, I spent the money on a pre-war second-hand edition of the Shorter English Oxford Dictionary, two volumes, and I love it still: faded with coffee cup rings – not mine – on the cover, the feeling of turning the brittle, foxed pages to find a word, the weight of it, the august definitions and derivations.
Somehow that dictionary makes language feel less processed, less slick, more ancient and important, much more vast. When I look up a word in a dictionary, I’ll locate it on a page among dozens of other unrelated words I’ve never known or thought to look up. It makes language feel wonderfully rich and various.
Our own words
Forty-seven Kiwi words were added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2023 including chur, hooning, flat stick and a number of te reo words such as iwi. Listener books editor Mark Broatch suggests a further 15 words and phrases that should be in the OED.
Skux – cool, fashionable, sexy – former Labour government minister Kiritapu Allan on her Civil Defence clothing: “I think it’s a pretty skux sorta outfit myself.”
Egg – idiot
Huckery – ugly, in bad condition
Munted – broken, defunct
Slutted – very annoyed
Everything’s apples – all is fine
Filthy – angry about something
Fizzing at the bung – very excited in anticipation
Flog – to steal
Hiff – to throw
Stink – very bad or annoying
Away laughing – to be well on one’s way to success
Bomb – old car
Donkey-deep – to be fully committed
Uso – bro