Month: October 2017
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Finding new Australian words
By Julia Robinson, editor and researcher at the Australian National Dictionary Centre It’s a year since we celebrated the launch of the new Australian National Dictionary, with its 16,000 Australian words and meanings. Since then we have not been taking it easy and neither has Australian English—we began collecting new words even as we sent off…
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Social media and classic Aussie idioms
By Mark Gwynn, editor and researcher at the Australian National Dictionary Centre This year the ANDC is using social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, to find variations on a number of well-known Australian idioms. The responses we receive are providing evidence for our Australian English database, and may be considered for inclusion in future editions of…
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Celebrating World Teachers’ Day with teachers in literature
More than a few famous writers started their professional lives as teachers, or taught at schools or universities between books. Before Dan Brown wrote his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, he taught English and Spanish, while William Golding’s The Lord of the Flies might have been inspired by his experience teaching high school English and…
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Oxford Word of the Month: October – lady tradie
noun: a part of a family home organised or designed so that adult children can have privacy from their parents. THE STORY BEHIND THE WORD OF THE MONTH High rents in urban areas and the housing affordability crisis in Australia have given rise to a now familiar problem for parents: when will the kids leave…