Tag: Australian National Dictionary
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Oxford Word of the Month: November – Melbourne Cup field
noun: 1. a very large and open field of applicants for a job, contract, etc. 2. a pool of highly-qualified competitors. THE STORY BEHIND THE WORD OF THE MONTH The Melbourne Cup is Australia’s most famous horse race, run annually on the first Tuesday in November at the Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne. The large amount…
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Spanner crabs, platform 27, and a one-duck duck farm
We had some interesting and entertaining correspondence from readers in response to our articles on Australian idioms in the last issue. In her article, Julia Miller was puzzled about the logic of the idiom mad as a box of spanners, asking ‘how can an inanimate spanner be angry or crazy?’ One reader, C. Roe (Qld),…
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Oxford Word of the Month: October – baggy green
noun: (also baggy green cap) 1. the cap worn by an Australian Test cricketer. 2. this cap as a symbol of selection in an Australian Test cricket team. 3. an Australian Test cricketer. THE STORY BEHIND THE WORD OF THE MONTH The baggy green cap is an emblem of this nation. (Sydney Morning Herald, 28…
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Words for pie (and why they’re all unappetising)
The humble meat pie is as Aussie as it gets. The iconic fist-sized pastry is light, flaky and golden on the outside, and filled with piping hot minced meat and gravy on the inside – perfect as a frosty winter’s day meal at the footy or a cheap, tasty snack from the servo. In the…
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Upcoming events for the Australian National Dictionary Second Edition
To celebrate the publication of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary, there will be events in Sydney and Melbourne this September. Starting on Thursday September 8 at 6 pm Abbey’s Bookshop in Sydney will be hosting an event with AND 2e editors Bruce Moore (former director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre) and Amanda Laugesen…
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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…
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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…
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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,…