macquarie

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. A barney is an argument or a fight. It is thought to have come across from a British dialect, though it isn’t certain how exactly it came to be. The word is also part of Polari, a slang language popular in British theatrical and comedy circles, particularly gay circles,

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at yakka. The word yakka means hard work, especially manual labour. This has been Australian slang since the 1880s but is one of many words we have in Australian English to originate from an Aboriginal language.

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at boomer. There are a lot of very different meanings for the word boomer in colloquial Australian English. The most common is as something large, like a crashing wave. But it is also popularly known to mean something successful or popular, as a party or song. A newer reference, unrelated to these two, is simply as the shortened version of baby boomer.

There are many names for this stalwart feature of an Australian childhood. Running barefoot across the grass is almost guaranteed to result in a bindi-eye in the sole of your foot. The bindi-eye is originally native to South America and was introduced to Australia in the early 20th century. Now known all over the country as … Read more

It’s that time again, when we look through our words to watch, often submitted by you for consideration in the Macquarie Dictionary. We are interested in hearing about words from all walks of life, be it from your profession, from everyday slang, from something your kids have said that you just couldn’t wrap your head around, we want … Read more

Anyone who lives near a beach might have seen a group of junior lifesavers, also known as nippers. There are a number of meanings for this word, but no clear etymology listed. An interesting and very likely now very much illegal meaning was a ‘young lad on a construction site or in a mine who … Read more

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at spud. Perhaps the most versatile and popular vegetable on the planet, the spud (or potato, for those not in the know) is a staple of classic Aussie food. From chips to chips, it is part of almost every meal.

While the goon of today is generally understood to be cheap cask wine, this meaning didn’t appear until the 1990s. For at least a decade before this, goon meant a flagon of wine. It is possible that this word came from a jocular pronunciation of flagoon. An offshoot of this word is the classic Aussie … Read more

The humble RSL (Returned Services League of Australia) club can be a mouthful, so in the Aussie tradition, it has been colloquially shortened to ‘rissole’. You may have heard the question “Want to go up the rissole?”, or, for entertainers, to “do the rissoles” is to make a tour of RSL clubs. Rissole has a number … Read more

This is an interesting piece of Sydney history. This turn of phrase means ‘to depart in haste’, and was originally Sydney slang dating back to the 1940s. It referred to the now-defunct trams along the Bondi line which were notoriously fast. It also dates from World War II services slang, when it also meant to go … Read more