What Maori language dictionaries are available and of what value are they?
A1. (1) The most important Maori-English dictionary is H.W. Williams’s A dictionary of the Maori language. The final edition was the 7th (1971). It has been reprinted many times. Commonly referred to as (The) Williams or Te Wiremu. According to staff from Wordstream (personal communication) Williams has 15,228 Maori headwords. It focuses on traditional Maori vocabulary. Headwords are often in given in a sentence (usually taken from an older manuscript) following each entry. There are many words in Williams (perhaps 1000s) that are unfamiliar to many native speakers of Maori today. Likewise there are probably 1000s of words currently used by native speakers and second language learners of Maori that are not listed in the dictionary. There are also gaps in Williams’s coverage of traditional Maori terms, perhaps more so in dialectal variation in the use of words. Williams is an essential item for students of the Maori language. (2) In 1981 Bruce Biggs (a former professor of Maori Studies
