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The Australian National Dictionary: Australian Words and Their Origins is a historical dictionary of Australian English, recording 16,000 words, phrases, and meanings of Australian origin and use. The first edition of the dictionary, edited by W. S. Ramson, was published in 1988 by Oxford University Press ; the second edition was edited by ...
This is a list of English words derived from Australian Aboriginal languages. Some are restricted to Australian English as a whole or to certain regions of the country. Others, such as kangaroo and boomerang , have become widely used in other varieties of English , and some have been borrowed into other languages beyond English.
Brass razoo is an Australian phrase that was first recorded in soldiers' slang in World War I. It is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as "a non-existent coin of trivial value". [ 1 ] It is commonly used in the expression I haven't got a brass razoo , meaning the speaker is out of money.
Numerous idiomatic phrases occur in Australian usage, some more historical than contemporary in usage. Send her down, Hughie is an example of surfie slang. Australian Football League spectators use the term "white maggot" (derived from their formerly white uniforms) towards umpires at games. [31]
Macquarie Dictionary's Australian Word Map ascribes six meanings, based on feedback from around the country, in which the word is used as several different parts of speech, mainly relating to deceit, joking, and false, but also to a lame (pathetic, bad) idea. As a verb ("gammon/gamin/gammin around") means to fool around, and may also be used as ...
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Note: As "Australian Aboriginal" is not a distinct language, but rather a collective term for a large group of languages, this category is useful as a holding place for all words with an origin in the different Aboriginal languages.
The expression "within cooee" has developed within Australian as slang for "within a manageable distance". It is often used in the negative sense (i.e., "you're not even within cooee", meaning not close to or, a long way off). Another example would be: "They realised they were lost and there was no-one within cooee".