Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. A barney is an argument or a fight. It is thought to have come across from a British dialect, though it isn’t certain how exactly it came to be. The word is also part of Polari, a slang language popular in British theatrical and comedy circles, particularly gay circles,

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at yakka. The word yakka means hard work, especially manual labour. This has been Australian slang since the 1880s but is one of many words we have in Australian English to originate from an Aboriginal language.

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at boomer. There are a lot of very different meanings for the word boomer in colloquial Australian English. The most common is as something large, like a crashing wave. But it is also popularly known to mean something successful or popular, as a party or song. A newer reference, unrelated to these two, is simply as the shortened version of baby boomer.

There are many names for this stalwart feature of an Australian childhood. Running barefoot across the grass is almost guaranteed to result in a bindi-eye

It’s that time again, when we look through our words to watch, often submitted by you for consideration in the Macquarie Dictionary. We are interested in hearing about

Anyone who lives near a beach might have seen a group of junior lifesavers, also known as nippers. There are a number of meanings for

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at spud. Perhaps the most versatile and popular vegetable on the planet, the spud (or potato, for those not in the know) is a staple of classic Aussie food. From chips to chips, it is part of almost every meal.

While the goon of today is generally understood to be cheap cask wine, this meaning didn’t appear until the 1990s. For at least a decade

The humble RSL (Returned Services League of Australia) club can be a mouthful, so in the Aussie tradition, it has been colloquially shortened to ‘rissole’.

This is an interesting piece of Sydney history. This turn of phrase means ‘to depart in haste’, and was originally Sydney slang dating back to

As editors of the Macquarie Dictionary, we wear many hats. One of the tasks that comes to us regularly is to create lists of words

The Gamilaraay (Kamilaroi) people are the Indigenous people of north-eastern NSW and south-western Queensland. They are one of the four largest Indigenous groups in Australia,

Each week, we have a look at a slang word from Australian English. This week we look at youse. A stalwart and consistently divisive member of the Australian English language, youse appears to be here to stay. This unusual word was first recorded back in the 1890s

Crypto languages are something of a passion of ours. You have arpie-darpie, aygo-paygo, obo language, pig Latin and rechtub kelat (a secret language of butchers!) to name

While it is now more commonly known as a pie floater, a floater is a meat pie served in pea soup. It originated in one

A bush telly is a campfire, or the stars – in other words, what you watch for entertainment at night in the bush. It’s rather a

Once a month, we pick out a few words submitted by you for consideration in the Macquarie Dictionary. There is no real criteria; we’re looking for anything specific