Month: August 2016

Australian food and drink quiz

Think you know your long blacks from your babyccinos or your cheerios from your chiko rolls? Australian cuisine, as food critic John Newton once wrote, is a bit of a ‘mongrel’, incorporating British, Mediterranean, Asian and native Australian cooking styles and ingredients. The Australian National Dictionary 2e contains a multitude of food-related slang terms, many of…

Rhyming slang in the Australian National Dictionary

The recent publication of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary is the culmination of more than 20 years of research into the history of our unique Australian lexicon. The scope of the dictionary, as defined in the first edition by editor W.S. Ramson, includes ‘words and meanings which have originated in Australia, which…

Straight to the poolroom with these Australian idioms

The second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (hereafter referred to as AND 2e) published at the start of the month. This new edition includes many new words and idioms. Some of these are words and expressions that have come into usage since the publication of the first edition in 1988; others are those we…

Did you know?

The platypus, a.k.a. duck-mole, paradox, water-mole, duck-bill, is the outcast of the Australian animal kingdom: ‘it is like a puppy in the body, with four webbed duck’s feet, two wings, a beaver’s tail, and a goose’s head and bill; now a country that can produce such a monstrosity as this can produce anything’ (J.A. Edwards,…

Oxford Word of the Month: August – Bush bride

noun: 1. a bride who lives and is married in a country area, in early use with the implication that her wedding lacks the external trappings of a city wedding. 2. a British woman who married an Australian servicemen in the UK during or immediately after the Second World War, and who migrated to Australia….