50 Fun Facts About Australian Slang

Which word, Oxford's Word of the Year for 2013, was first recorded on an Australian internet forum in 2002?

Selfie first appeared in a 2002 post on Dr Karl Kruszelnicki's science forum, where a man apologised for the focus of a photo showing the lip he split at a mate's 21st.

An Australian who says 'see you this arvo', a word first recorded in the 1920s, plans to meet at what time?

Afternoon is what 'arvo' abbreviates, and 'this arvo' is so common it is often squeezed further into 'sarvo'. The word follows the Australian habit of adding -o to a shortened word, as in journo.

Which beach item, called 'jandals' in New Zealand, do Australians mean when they talk about a pair of 'thongs'?

Flip-flops are 'thongs' in Australia, where the word Americans use for skimpy underwear means a rubber sandal. New Zealand's 'jandal' began as a trademark built from 'Japanese sandals'.

The Australian invitation 'bring a plate', recorded since the 1920s, often baffles newcomers; what should guests take?

Food to share is what the host expects, and an empty plate will not do. In earlier days the request was often 'ladies a plate', sometimes followed by 'gentlemen a donation'.

Which Australian insult for a fool is traced to a 1920s racehorse that never won in 37 starts?

Drongo the horse ran second in a VRC Derby yet never won a race. After he retired, racegoers used his name for unlucky horses, then for hopeless people and finally for fools.

Australians warn gullible tourists about the 'drop bear', a sharp-toothed imaginary version of which real animal?

Koala lookalikes with very sharp teeth, drop bears are said to fall from trees onto tourists. The first written record is from the 1980s, though the tale may date from the Second World War.

Which nickname for McDonald's is so widely used in Australia that the company has registered it as a trademark there?

Macca's follows the Australian habit of clipping a name and adding a friendly ending, as in Salvos for the Salvation Army, a nickname that charity also uses officially.

Which Australian star's 1980s tourism adverts carried the greeting 'g'day' to television audiences around the world?

Paul Hogan fronted the campaign shortly before 'Crocodile Dundee' made him a film star. The greeting itself, a clipped 'good day', had been recorded in Australia since the 1880s.

In the 'chook raffles' held at Australian pubs and clubs, the prize is a ready-to-cook example of which bird?

Chicken is what 'chook' means, a word that comes from the British dialect 'chuck' or 'chucky'. It was first recorded in Australia in 1855, spelt 'chuckey'.

Recorded since the late 1990s, the Australian term 'budgie smugglers' is a joke name for which item of men's clothing?

Swim briefs earned the name from the look of the tight garment, 'budgie' being short for budgerigar, a small parrot. The phrase is probably a twist on the international 'grape smugglers'.

Which backyard structure, once emptied by a man who called regularly with a cart, do Australians call a 'dunny'?

A toilet of any kind can now be a dunny, but the word first meant an outside one. It comes from the British dialect 'dunnekin', built from 'dung' and 'ken', an old word for a house.

Formed with the same '-o' ending as 'ambo' and 'garbo', what kind of roadside business is an Australian 'servo'?

Petrol station, or service station, is the meaning, clipped and given the '-o' ending Australians add to so many words. The same pattern turns a musician into a 'muso' and a journalist into a 'journo'.

Once the name for a mobile collector of used bottles, 'bottle-o' now means which kind of Australian shop?

A liquor store is known as a bottle shop in Australia, and 'bottle-o' is its clipped form. The older 'bottle-oh' was a mobile collector who gathered empties for return and re-use.

In Australian rhyming slang, a customer who asks for 'dead horse' on a meat pie wants which condiment?

Tomato sauce becomes 'dead horse' because 'horse' and 'sauce' rhyme in an Australian accent. Other home-grown rhymes include 'Barry Crocker' for a shocker and 'billy lid' for a kid.

Linked by one theory to a convict who lived 32 years among Aboriginal people, what does 'Buckley's chance' mean?

Almost no hope is what William Buckley seemed to have when he fled Port Phillip in 1803. A rival theory points to the Melbourne firm Buckley and Nunn, as in 'two chances, Buckley's and none'.

An Australian 'ute', short for 'utility' and celebrated at rural gatherings called musters, is which kind of vehicle?

Pickup truck is the nearest American term for a ute, a word first recorded in 1943. Ute musters hand out prizes in categories such as 'best street ute' and 'best feral ute'.

People from which Australian state are jokingly known as 'banana benders', a nickname first recorded in 1940?

Queensland earned the nickname from the joke that its people spend their days putting the bends into bananas. Its southern border has been called the 'Banana curtain'.

Australian shoppers asking a sales assistant for 'manchester', a usage recorded since the 1840s, want which goods?

Household linen took the name from 'Manchester wares', the cotton goods once made in the English city. London shop assistants are reputed to be baffled when Australians ask where to find it.

In Australian schoolyards, 'dobbing' on a classmate, from a verb first recorded in the 1950s, means doing what?

Informing on them breaks the Australian code of standing by your mates, so dobbing is widely frowned on. The verb probably comes from a British dialect word for throwing something down heavily.

Which lunchtime staple do Australians call a 'sanger', a word that took over from the 1940s form 'sango'?

A sandwich has been a sanger since the 1960s, and Australians happily order steak sangers, veggie sangers and even 'double banger sangers'.

Which Australian word for a false rumour comes from the name on water carts that served First World War army camps?

Furphy was the name on carts made by J. Furphy & Sons of Shepparton, Victoria. The word probably spread from Melbourne's Broadmeadows camp, where soldiers gossiped around the carts, and was on record by 1915.

Which prime minister's name became Australian rhyming slang for a hasty exit after he vanished while swimming in 1967?

Harold Holt disappeared, presumed drowned, at Portsea in Victoria, and to 'do a Harold Holt' is to bolt. The rhyming half is often dropped, so people also 'do a Harold' or 'do a Harry'.

Short for a two-word Biblical rhyme, what has an Australian surfer spotted when warning of a 'Noah' in the water?

A shark is a 'Noah' because Noah's ark rhymes with it, and as with much slang of this kind the rhyming half is left off. The usage is first recorded in the 1930s.

Which fruit, used by 1912 as rhyming slang for 'immigrant', is the likely source of the Australian nickname 'pom'?

Pomegranate, also written 'Pommy Grant', replaced the older rhyme 'Jimmy Grant' as a jeering name for new arrivals. It was quickly clipped to 'pommy' and 'pom', which stuck to the British in particular.

Which Australian insult for an uncouth person went mainstream when TV schoolgirl Kylie Mole used it in the late 1980s?

Bogan had been teenage slang before Kylie Mole, a character in 'The Comedy Company', made it widespread. A link to the Bogan River in New South Wales is often suggested but is far from certain.

Which Australian word for a likeable rule-breaker first described young street-gang hooligans in the 1860s?

Larrikin comes from a British dialect word for a mischievous youth, itself linked to 'larking about'. Only from the 1890s did it soften into praise for a good-hearted rough diamond.

Which nickname for an Australian soldier, first recorded in 1916, had earlier been used for miners on the goldfields?

Digger was applied to Australian and New Zealand troops in the First World War because so much of their time went on digging trenches. Wartime prime minister Billy Hughes was known as the Little Digger.

Which word for cheap wine probably began as Australian soldiers' First World War take on the French 'vin blanc'?

Plonk seems to have grown out of 'van blonk', one of several soldiers' attempts at the phrase alongside 'plink-plonk' and 'point blank'. First recorded in 1919, it has since spread to other Englishes.

Linguists sort Australian accents into Broad, General and which third type, as spoken by actor Cate Blanchett?

Cultivated Australian was once the prestige accent and has some similarities to British Received Pronunciation. It has declined sharply, and Malcolm Fraser is cited as the last prime minister to use it in public life.

Australian police and governments use the label 'anti-hoon laws' for legislation aimed at which kind of people?

Reckless drivers have been 'hoons' only since the 1980s; from the 1930s the word meant a lout or show-off. New South Wales even put it in a statute title, the Car Hoons Act of 2008.

An Australian who is 'flat out like a lizard drinking', a phrase first recorded in the 1930s, is in what state?

Extremely busy is the meaning, and the joke plays on two senses of 'flat out': lying stretched on the ground and going at top speed. A drinking lizard's tongue also moves very quickly.

Borrowed from the Yagara language of the Brisbane region and usually paired with 'hard', what does 'yakka' mean?

Work is the meaning, and 'yakka' began in the 1840s as a verb before passing through nineteenth-century pidgin into everyday Australian English. It is sometimes spelt 'yakker' or 'yacker'.

Which Australian bush call, from an Aboriginal word meaning 'come here', also features in a phrase meaning 'nearby'?

Cooee comes from 'gawi' or 'guwi' in the Aboriginal language of the Sydney area, and settlers adopted the call early. To be 'within cooee' of something is to be within earshot or close to it.

An Australian fan who 'barracks for' a football team, a usage first recorded in the 1880s, is doing what?

Cheering them on is the Australian sense, a reversal of the older meaning: on its own 'barrack' meant to jeer, as it still does in British English. It probably comes from a Northern Irish word for bragging.

Which cheap drink do Australians call 'goon', a word perhaps shaped by an altered pronunciation of 'flagon'?

Cask wine is 'goon', and the bag inside the cask is a 'goon bag'. The word may also come from 'goom', an older term for methylated spirits drunk as alcohol.

Which coin-tossing gambling game, played in Australian pubs on Anzac Day, uses a flat board called a 'kip'?

Two-up was a favourite of Australian soldiers in the First World War, which is why pubs and RSL clubs stage it each 25 April. A ring-keeper runs the game and a 'spinner' tosses the pennies.

In the title of the song 'Waltzing Matilda', the 'Matilda' is slang for which possession of a wandering bush worker?

His bedroll, or swag, was a blanket-wrapped bundle carried on the back, and to 'waltz Matilda' was to tramp the roads with it. Dictionaries still call the choice of a woman's name unexplained.

Around Perth, the word 'kylie', better known as a girl's name, is a Noongar-derived term for which traditional object?

A boomerang is still called a kylie in parts of Western Australia, from the Noongar language of the south-west. One settler's 1835 diary grumbled that the 'nasty' Sydney word had pushed out the proper local name.

First recorded in the dialect of Lincolnshire in 1881, what does the classic Australian phrase 'fair dinkum' mean?

Genuine, honest or true is the sense, though in Lincolnshire 'fair dinkum' meant fair dealing. It was the local equivalent of West Yorkshire's 'fair doos'.

An Australian who does not have 'a brass razoo', a phrase recorded since 1927, is penniless, but what is a razoo?

A non-existent coin of trivial value, the razoo was never real currency, and its name may be a corruption of the French 'sou'. The 'brass' probably echoes the English 'brass farthing'.

The processed lunch meat called 'devon' on Australia's east coast goes by which name in South Australia?

Fritz is the word in South Australia and 'polony' the one Western Australians use for the same meat. Australian English varies little by region, so word choices like this one stand out.

A 285 ml beer glass is a 'middy' in Sydney and a 'handle' in Darwin; what do Melbourne drinkers call it?

Pot is the Melbourne and Brisbane name, while Hobart drinkers call the same glass a 'ten' after its ten fluid ounces. In Adelaide it is a 'schooner', a name that means a larger glass in other cities.

In Western Australia, what is the 'Fremantle Doctor', a summer visitor recorded under that name since the 1870s?

A cool sea breeze that blows inland late on hot days, the 'doctor' takes its name from an older use of the word for anything that restores health. Albany, Geraldton and Esperance have doctors of their own.

In the Australian Parliament, what is a 'Dorothy Dixer', a term named after an American newspaper advice columnist?

A planted question, asked by a member of the governing party so a minister can deliver a prepared reply, is named after Dorothy Dix. Her column seemed so contrived that she appeared to write the letters as well as the answers.

Before decimal currency arrived in 1966, which Australian coin was nicknamed a 'zac', probably from Scottish dialect?

Sixpence became 'zac' by way of the Scottish 'saxpence', and the word outlived the coins. Something of little value is still 'not worth a zac'.

A 'Jacky Howe', named after a record-breaking shearer of the 1890s, is which piece of Australian workwear?

A navy singlet cut low under the arms was the trademark of Jacky Howe, who sheared 321 sheep by hand in 7 hours 40 minutes. His record stood until 1950, when it fell to a shearer using a machine.

First recorded in Kylie Tennant's 1941 novel 'The Battlers', what kind of person is an Australian 'illywhacker'?

A small-time con man, the illywhacker followed country shows selling imitation diamond pins and miracle tonics. Peter Carey borrowed the word for the title of his 1985 novel.

Australians who appeal to 'Hughie' to 'send it down', a plea first recorded in 1912, are asking for what?

Rain is what Hughie controls, though since the 1950s surfers have also begged him for good waves. Guesses at who he is range from Jupiter and Zeus to the Greek 'huei', meaning 'it is raining'.

Claimed as his own coinage by Sydney newspaper editor John Norton, what kind of person is an Australian 'wowser'?

A killjoy who polices other people's pleasures is a wowser, a word recorded from 1900. Norton said he first used it in the city council, about an alderman named Waterhouse.

Which athlete, who won 2002 Olympic gold after all the opponents fell, gave Australians a phrase for an unlikely win?

Steven Bradbury came from well behind when his opponents fell at the 2002 Winter Olympics. To 'do a Bradbury' entered the language at once, appearing in a newspaper within days of the race.