Tag: dictionary
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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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Making the dictionary ‘fair dinkum’
As a primary school student in the mid-1980s one of my favourite in-class games was the ‘Dictionary Game’. Mr Brenchly would read out the definition from a word in our school dictionary and we would be asked to find the word that was being defined in our copy of the dictionary. There is one word…
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Move over, tennis mums, a new breed of tennis mom has arrived in the updated Oxford English Dictionary
You might remember the term tennis mum being used to describe women who returned to tennis after becoming mothers. Now, tennis mom and tennis dad refer to parents who actively and enthusiastically support their child’s participation in the sport. They are among the tennis-related, lifestyle, current affairs and educational terms included in the latest update of the Oxford…
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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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Do you know what a ‘Googery’ is?
In this article, reproduced from our latest issue of Ozwords, Bruce Moore explores an Australian English word from an aboriginal language, ‘googery’. In Lily on the Dustbin: Slang of Australian Women and Families (1982), Nancy Keesing includes a list of words supplied to her by the poet Les Murray. Included in the list is the…