Blogs

How well do you know your phobias? Take the Halloween edition phobia quiz to find out!

My attention has been drawn to the creation of the new verb, to wibble-wobble, meaning ‘to prevaricate’.  This is a contribution of Mathias Cormann who made reference to the nursery rhyme, Jelly on a Plate which has the verse… Read more…

Here at the Macquarie Dictionary, we put our heads together and came up with a few overlooked sports that we think would be perfect in the next games. Read more…

This NAIDOC Week, we celebrated Indigenous culture by highlighting some of the many words that have become a part of Australian English from various Indigenous languages. Read more…

Not so long ago, the world was swept up in the all-consuming new gaming phenomenon of Pokémon Go. Unless you live in a very remote, secluded area, you will have seen the evidence of Pokémania… Read more…

A few years ago an executive from the McCann advertising agency approached me with an idea to document the process of the coining of a new word. He had a social phenomenon in mind for which he wished to find a word… Read more…

A friend of mine in Singapore reported that the Singaporean government has taken up the term pioneer to refer to anyone old enough to have contributed to Singapore’s early nationhood from 1955 onwards. Pioneers… Read more…

The grolar bear was added to the dictionary in 2015, and before you ask, no, we didn’t make it up. Read more…

Doomsday, Judgement Day, or the Apocalypse, whatever you want to call it, the strategy of being prepared for an unknown disaster is now becoming more and more a reality for some people. As I was flipping through the channels on TV the other night, I happened across an American reality show – Doomsday Preppers, profiling … Read more

The Australian Writers’ Centre recently held a competition asking for the best invented portmanteau. They awarded their winners, but we’ve trawled through the entries and found some favourites of our own. Read more…