Counting down from popularity, here’s what you and the rest of Australia (and the world) wanted to talk about in 2017. Read more…

As a term, fake news seems to be a poorly understood one. When levelled as a pejorative against media organisations, it calls to mind Dylan Thomas’s definition of an alcoholic: someone you don’t like who publishes as much as you do. Pressed to define what makes fake news distinct from, say, poor reporting, the ABC’s language committee broadly agreed that that fake news must be deliberately inaccurate, designed to look like real news, and intended to mislead rather than entertain. Satire, in other words, doesn’t count. Read more…

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 from December 2017 here…

This year over 150,000 students from across New South Wales competed in the Premier’s Spelling Bee 2017, the largest Spelling Bee in the country. As sponsors of the event, Macquarie Dictionary was there to witness the intelligent junior and senior students spell everything from sleuth to thermodynamics to sauerkraut. Read more…

Yesterday the Macquarie Dictionary team attended the Text100 event at the Botanical Gardens in Sydney to discuss all things words in 2017, in line with the theme: Make Your Words Matter. 

In my years as a dictionary editor I have found that one thing that stirs the imagination of an audience and puts a certain light in their eyes is the notion that they might make up a word that gets into the dictionary.  I think that what stirs them is the desire to make their mark and leave it for posterity. Read more…

We all know that babies learn language from their parents. Indeed if they are deprived of this language learning – as happened with children who were lost and lived in the wild – then they find it very difficult to learn language when they are much older and rediscovered. Read more…

This Halloween, we’re thinking about one of our favourite suffixes, -mancy. Meaning ‘divination’, there are many fascinating words depicting the craft of what is in some cases very specific forms of fortune telling. These are largely older words, but we’ve picked a few of the best. Let us know of any new words (we’ve got our eye on technomancy and lexicomancy is starting to look pretty good too) that relate to divination. Read more…

The early European settlers had much to find words for in the Australian landscape and their choice was either to borrow from Aboriginal languages (kangaroo, dingo, budgerigar, coolibah) or take a word from British English, often British dialect, and stretch the original meaning to the new shape (wattle, creek, magpie, paddock). Read more…

It’s been a while since a politician has resorted to branding their opponents as un-Australian but we had an instance of it recently with Immigration Minister Peter Dutton applying it to pro-bono lawyers defending refugees. It has to be said that he was prompted to do it by radio broadcaster Alan Jones but he took it up willingly enough. Read more…

English borrows from many languages, but it has more trouble digesting some borrowed words than others. Of late we seem to have taken on board many more words from Japanese, mostly to do with food and drink. Read more…

You would think that the answer to this would be ‘after a suitable period of time’. For example, table comes from tabula, borrowed into Old English from Classical Latin. Read more…

A dictionary reader asked about the distinction between persons and people, both indicating plurality but having different connotations.

If we start with the etymologies of the two words we can see that they are coming from different directions… Read more…