Here at Macquarie Dictionary, we like to let the year end completely before we make a decision on which word to crown Word of the Year. We have a basic policy that all the candidates are drawn from words which have been selected and researched and written into the dictionary during the year… Read more…
A thesaurus is a treasure trove of new words for you to discover. More people write now than ever before, whether it be in messages, emails, articles, stories, or anything else. It’s important to keep the mind sharp and the vocabulary growing and one of the many ways to do this is to utilise a thesaurus…. Read more…
Many words have more than one definition, and these are listed in each entry numerically. But is there any order to this or is it organised chaos? In this case, thankfully, there are specific rules for how definitions are ordered. In a word such as joke or kangaroo or any word where there are multiple meanings, the following applies… Read more…
Counting down from popularity, here’s what you and the rest of Australia (and the world) wanted to know about in 2016. Read more…
The English language has the capacity to create new forms, often by fusing two existing words to create one word with a new meaning, such as gasbag or chinwag. This is by far the most common way of expanding our lexicon. Read more…
Recently I gave a talk at Nunawading Library in Melbourne. The discussion afterwards was on various current usage problems, including the use of the word literally as a marker of emphasis with no real meaning but a functionality that seems to be much enjoyed by many people in spoken and written language… Read more…
How well do you know your phobias? Take the Halloween edition phobia quiz to find out!
My attention has been drawn to the creation of the new verb, to wibble-wobble, meaning ‘to prevaricate’. This is a contribution of Mathias Cormann who made reference to the nursery rhyme, Jelly on a Plate which has the verse… Read more…
Here at the Macquarie Dictionary, we put our heads together and came up with a few overlooked sports that we think would be perfect in the next games. Read more…
This NAIDOC Week, we celebrated Indigenous culture by highlighting some of the many words that have become a part of Australian English from various Indigenous languages. Read more…
