macquarie

A wee juggler is a slang name for the Major Mitchell, a cockatoo with white wings, pink underparts, neck and face, and white crown suffused with salmon pink and forward-curving scarlet crest…

You may remember a few weeks ago when we featured wombat-headed as our Aussie Word of the Week. Well this week we have another great Aussie insult. Pie-eater...

Words that have been borrowed into English from Australian Indigenous languages have often followed a circuitous path, beset by failures in communication between the Indigenous peoples and the colonisers. The legend of kangaroo has become a kind of symbol of this narrative, but we see it to varying degrees in the etymology of many words. Like dingo, which comes … Read more

It is a myth that is, despite being debunked in the 1970s,  still rampant – still passed smugly between schoolchildren in playgrounds all over Australia. It was certainly something I believed for a long time, and is still circulated in popular culture, including in the 2016 blockbuster Arrival – a film with a linguist protagonist, … Read more

Prawn has been a part of Australian slang since the 1890s, to call someone a prawn is to call them a fool or jerk…

The baggy green is the cap worn by Australian test cricket players. It is traditionally presented to players before their debut test match, the baggy green has a long and storied history. Sometimes switched to green baggy, this cap has been worn and cherished by players from Bradman to Steve Waugh, right up to members of … Read more

The word deadly with its current meaning was originally coined in the 1900s. It was then adopted into Aboriginal English in the 1970s and from then into general use. Excellent, fantastic, cool: That movie was deadly! It is also used as an adverb, as in: he sang deadly. Interestingly, deadly is also used in Ireland with the same positive meaning. … Read more

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at wombat-headed. Meaning dull, stupid or block-headed, wombat-headed is a great Aussie insult originating from Ned Kelly’s famous 1879 Jerilderie letter. 

We recently received a letter asking about the derivation of the word echidna. Was our iconic spiny anteater connected to the terrifying goddess Echidna of Greek mythology? Echidna comes from New Latin from the Greek word ekhidna meaning ‘viper’. The Greek mythological being was so named because she was half-woman and half-serpent. She was also known as … Read more

Words can be beautiful in the way they look, the way they sound and in what they mean. Some words hit the trifecta of beauty, and others have only one. And still more are only beautiful to some people. We have a pretty good idea of what we like to see in words, but it’s … Read more