The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. 2nd ed.

Sarah Robertson is the editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Since the first edition was published in 1998, the award-winning
Canadian Oxford Dictionary has sold over 200,000 copies and beat the
competition to become the official dictionary of The Canadian Press and
The Globe and Mail.

A major part of the revision for the second edition—a lexicon of
300,000 words, phrases, and definitions—is the addition of more than
5000 new words, phrases, and senses, including bling, blog, cybersex,
dirty bomb, double-double, fuckwit, hockey hair, supersize, tanning bed,
and weapon of mass destruction. Reflecting the recent legalization of
same-sex marriages in Canada, the first definition of marriage has been
changed from “the legal or religious union of a man and a woman in
order to live together and often to have children” to “the legal or
religious union of two people.”

Another notable change in the second edition is the addition of
recommended word breaks in headwords. As you’d expect, there are new
biographical entries, including Adrienne Clarkson, Ben Heppner, Shania
Twain, and Mike Weir. Currency units have been updated and geographical
entries have been revised to reflect changing political realities. In
some cases, style has been altered; for example, the first edition
stylings of e-mail, spell checker, and Web site have been changed in the
second edition to email, spell-checker, and website.

Carry-overs from the first edition include a style guide and other
short appendixes, “A Guide to the Use of This Dictionary,” and a
lucid and erudite essay on the history of Canadian English. The Timeline
of the English Language, which was added to the 2001 reissue of the
first edition, is another feature that has been retained.

The winner to date of the Canadian dictionary wars, Canadian Oxford
Dictionary is an essential resource for home and school libraries.