Definition:
An English word or phrase--or a feature of grammar, spelling, or pronunciation--that originated in Australia and/or is used primarily by Australians. See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "[S]ome Australianisms in English may have passed via Aboriginal pidgin from English back into English. This is a likely source for jumbuck 'sheep,' perhaps from jump up (Ramson 1966: 107). At present whitefellow from Aboriginal pidgin is nudging its way into general English, and walkabout, originally an Aboriginal period of wandering in the bush, now has royal patronage."
(George W. Turner, "English in Australia," in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 5, ed. by Robert Burchfield. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995) - "Today, Australian English, famous for its air of novelty, is something of a living museum, preserving several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regional words from Cornwall, Wessex, the Midlands, East Anglia, Northumbria, Scotland and Ireland. To take just a few examples, words like corker, dust-up, purler and tootsy all came to Australia from Ireland via the cotton mills of Lancashire; Billy comes from the Scottish bally, meaning 'a milk pail.' Australians get larrikin from Worcestershire and Warwickshire, where the word originally meant 'a mischievous or frolicosme youth.' A typical Australianism like fossick, meaning 'to search unsystematically,' is a Cornish word, showing the influence of the Cornish miners who settled in Southern Australia. . . . Cobber almost certainly came from the Suffolk verb to cob, 'to take a liking to someone.' Tucker, widely used for 'food,' had various English origins."
(Robert McCrum et al., The Story of English. Viking, 1986)
