Ever been phubbed?
A few years ago an executive from the McCann advertising agency approached me with an idea to document the process of the coining of a new word. He had a social phenomenon in mind for which he wished to find a word… Read more…
Blogs
Reflecting Australia’s gerrys
A friend of mine in Singapore reported that the Singaporean government has taken up the term pioneer to refer to anyone old enough to have contributed to Singapore’s early nationhood from 1955 onwards. Pioneers… Read more…
Ligers and tigons and grolar bears, oh my!
The grolar bear was added to the dictionary in 2015, and before you ask, no, we didn’t make it up. Read more…
Are you prepped enough for doomsday?
Doomsday, Judgement Day, or the Apocalypse, whatever you want to call it, the strategy of being prepared for an unknown disaster is now becoming more
Should these words go in the Macquarie Dictionary?
We are always on the lookout for new, emerging and interesting words to add to the Macquarie Dictionary. In a time of global instant communication, these words are popping up faster and in vaster quantities than ever before. Read more…
Our favourite invented portmanteaus from members of the Australian Writers’ Centre
The Australian Writers’ Centre recently held a competition asking for the best invented portmanteau. They awarded their winners, but we’ve trawled through the entries and found some favourites of our own. Read more…
Buttercups or blogs?
Oxford University Press, in revising the headword list of their Junior Dictionary, gave rise to a discussion in the British press… Read more…
Should these words go in the Macquarie Dictionary?
We are always on the lookout for new, emerging and interesting words to add to the Macquarie Dictionary. In a time of global instant communication, these words are popping up faster and in vaster quantities than ever before. Read more…
Words that disappear
Spare a thought for the words that disappear from use because the thing they represent becomes outmoded. Read more…
Quite the change
Recently we discovered that some of us used the little word quite in quite different ways. Some of us were quite devastated by this. Read more…
Jail vs Gaol
The spelling gaol was the accepted spelling in Australian English until the 1990s… Read more…
Fit as a fiddle
The phrase fit as a fiddle dates back to the 1600s in British English, but had a slightly different meaning then. Read more…
Far-fetched or far-flung?
A bit of research revealed to me that far-flung instead of far-fetched was gaining in frequency. Read more…
Portmanteau words
Crunching words together to make a new coinage has been a popular pastime in the English language since the nineteenth century… Read more…
Easter
There is so much symbolism surrounding the festival of Easter that it is hard to unpick. Read more…
Antique words
Just as we love our antique bric-a-brac, so too do we love our antique words. We pick up an object, speculate on its purpose in life, admire its shape and colour even if we have no idea where it came from and what it is supposed to do. Read more…
