Trending 19 September 2016

Fairy Bread Makes National Dictionary

Great news for Australian history: budgie smugglers, firies and battered savs have finally found a place to come together.

Twenty-eight years after the first edition was released in 1988, the Australian National Dictionary has undergone its first major update and immortalised some truly iconic Aussie vocabulary in the process.
Released earlier this month, the updated dictionary features 6,000 new words and phrases, with words from over 100 Indigenous languages also included.

“One of the important things that the dictionary does, I think, is give you a sense of the way these words tell the history of Australia,” Oxford University Press managing director Peter van Noorden told the ABC in his recent interview.

In addition to iconic colloquialisms such as “carrying on like a pork chop” and “doing a Bradbury”, the dictionary now also includes a record of culinary delights like “dim sims”, “battered savs”, “chocolate crackles” and “fairy bread”. See what you think – pop it onto your Christmas list.


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