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…
Not so long ago, the world was swept up in the all-consuming new gaming phenomenon of Pokémon Go. Unless you live in a very remote, secluded area, you will have seen the evidence of Pokémania… Read more…
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…
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…
The grolar bear was added to the dictionary in 2015, and before you ask, no, we didn’t make it up. Read more…
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
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…
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…
Oxford University Press, in revising the headword list of their Junior Dictionary, gave rise to a discussion in the British press… 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…
Spare a thought for the words that disappear from use because the thing they represent becomes outmoded. Read more…
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…
The spelling gaol was the accepted spelling in Australian English until the 1990s… Read more…
The phrase fit as a fiddle dates back to the 1600s in British English, but had a slightly different meaning then. Read more…
A bit of research revealed to me that far-flung instead of far-fetched was gaining in frequency. Read more…
Crunching words together to make a new coinage has been a popular pastime in the English language since the nineteenth century… Read more…
There is so much symbolism surrounding the festival of Easter that it is hard to unpick. Read more…
