There's something weird about that marketing angle coming from a dictionary; it seems somehow at odds with the notion of completeness that we associate with reference materials. Like "there are secret words that only paying customers get to know about", or something?

Less- and more-comprehensive versions of dictionaries is a long-standing thing. And you've usually had to pay for all of them—I think it's weirder that you'd expect to have a fully-complete version of something that takes a lot of expert knowledge and time to put together for free.

It's interesting to think about it this way. I do have dictionaries of different sizes that I've paid for, yet somehow the differences between them didn't strike me the same way this marketing campaign does.

With an abridged dictionary, there's no notice when it omits information. The web site's presentation makes it very clear that you're missing out on the full experience, and the tone seems a little like the company's holding the information "hostage". The realities haven't changed, but perception changes along with the presentation.

Good point, the internet does make the upsell much much much more in-your-face.

It's more than that; I'm old enough to have carried a compact Spanish-English dictionary while traveling. An unabridged dictionary was heavy enough that you couldn't hold it in one hand.

In other words, there used to be such a thing as 'too much dictionary'. Now, like any other information source, it's the size of my phone, except when it's the size of my laptop.

They still vary greatly in quality and (accordingly) price.I have several chinese/english dictionaries installed through Pleco (on my phone). With a couple exceptions, they're not free.

When I was taking a formal class in Mandarin, some classmates complained, "the definitions you're getting from Pleco are so much better than ours! What are you doing differently?" They lost interest when I responded "I paid for the better dictionaries".

Different dictionaries have different strengths. CC-CEDICT has entries for standard Chinese versions of western names, and for slang. Then again, it doesn't even have usage examples. ABC has many, many entries, including stuff like technical terms in linguistics. Tuttle Learners' has very few entries (it's a learners' dictionary!), but it does nice things like provide antonyms and, where it might be helpful, character-by-character glosses. Tuttle has my favorite entry for 糟糕 [a mess/very bad/bad luck], headed by "[modif: 糟 messy + 糕 cake]".

I remember the complete Oxford dictionary in my school library because it stretched over many large volumes. Forget holding it, you need a trolley!

More expensive unabridged dictionaries and less exepensive abridged veraions have been the norm for nearly as long as commercially published dictionaries have been a thing. That one of the cheaper abridged ones is now free on the web doesn't really change that.

To the best of my knowledge, I've never heard the word "multiplicate" either, and I wouldn't have been surprised if there were no dictionary entry for it at all.

If you know the word "duplicate", though, you should be able to figure this one out.