Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a dictionary.

1862		Golden Age (Queenbeyan, NSW) 21 Aug. 2/5: Only hear him use the 'Dic,' and then if you don’t say he understands jawbreakers, why, I will ‘go blind to be buried’ [...] he is well up in Johnson.
1864, 1867, 1870		Hotten Sl. Dict. 120: DICK, abbreviation of ‘Dictionary’.
1873		Sl. Dict.
1896		W.C. Gore Student Sl. in Cohen (1997) 6: dic. Dictionary.
c.1905		J. Furphy Rigby’s Romance (1921) Ch. xxii: 🌐 Rigby’s always correct in his dic., no matter how rotten his arguments are.
1912		Sport (Adelaide) 28 Sept. 15/2: They Say [...] That Sam T.. the pomegranate, doesn’t like being referred to as a dictionary. Dick, he isn’t.
1914		E. Wittmann ‘Clipped Words’ in DN IV:ii 124: dic, from dictionary ‘How do you spell autochthonous?’ ‘Look it up in the dic.’.
1929		E. Dahlberg Bottom Dogs 264: Walsh said Lorry packed a mean mitt at Webster’s dic.

2. ‘jaw-breaking’, pretentious language [fig. use of sense 1].

1860

T. Haliburton Season Ticket 250: I can’t gib ’em Latin or Greek as church minister does, and I can’t talk dic (dictionary).