This handsome soft-bound volume signals its content matter by the nineteenth-century charcoal sketch of a flock of sheep in New Zealand native bush on its glossy cover. The book is a re-organized version of the author's doctoral thesis in New Zealand English lexicography. (Dianne Bardsley was formerly the director of the New Zealand Dictionary Centre.) The publication of her academic research benefits both New Zealanders and the international lexicographical community in that it has made her findings accessible to a much wider audience. As such, it should be seen in a global context and represents an important scholarly contribution to the ongoing documentation of lexis unique to a particular regional variety of English.

The book is divided into ten chapters with alliterative titles such as “Altitude and attitude” and “Feed and fibre.” Each chapter is very brief, consisting of between two and five pages, and is followed by its word list, with entries arranged alphabetically and sometimes further categorized under subheadings such as “Adaptations and innovations” and “Plant and animal pests and diseases.” The bulk of the book is taken up by these dictionary sections. Entries conform to the OED's historical principles in that they consist of the lexeme, a definition, and three citations in chronological order. Judicious use of black and white archival photographs adds to the text.

In the forematter the author states that “Many terms collected … have been omitted, being too numerous to include.” It would have been useful had the principles used for exclusion been given here. In this section, too, Bardsley mentions the difficulty of separating the mass of lexis into themes, so that some words appear in more than one chapter, and some compounds and collocations of a single headword are listed in different chapters. Again, to have the rationale for these decisions would have been interesting. Bardsley also warns readers who look up a word that they may find surprising omissions, due to the use of a “predetermined data source set.” The dataset however is not specified, so the reader cannot see the sources used. Length constraints were doubtless at work here but a page or even a paragraph explaining this concept and the methodology behind it would have been helpful to lay readers. Two minor points are a number of typographical errors and the unusually small type size, which presumably was necessary in order to keep the book to a manageable 464 pages. However, there is generous spacing of the word lists and this prevents the general impression of the book from appearing overly dense.

Unless you are the sort of person who reads a dictionary cover to cover, this will be a book to dip into and browse from rather than to read straight through. To all who are interested in the vocabulary of world Englishes, the history of how words were borrowed or coined in a context where European settlers in a time of colonialism met, mixed, and often clashed with an indigenous people who spoke their own very different language, or simply in the agricultural and pastoral sector of New Zealand, this book will hold much of interest.