Here at the Macquarie Dictionary, we have maintained our card catalogue from the early 1980s. It’s in more or less pristine condition, and contained within are hundreds of thousands of original words and definitions from the very first edition of our dictionary.
But what is a card catalogue, you might ask. It’s a hardcopy database, previously often used in libraries, for listing all the items contained within. We used ours as a list of words and definitions, and as a snapshot of the time, it is priceless. We’ve gone through and found a few classic, interesting and in some cases, confusing entries from the time.
What do you think? Are there any words circa the 1980s you’d like to see?
