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Blogs

Mateship and friendship

It is my feeling that mateship is a stronger and tougher relationship than friendship, having been forged in adversity.

The basic sense of friend is a person with whom you have achieved a degree of intimacy that is entirely unfettered by a sense of obligation. Friendship excludes the bonds of affection that are there between blood relations or between lovers. Read more…

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The shifting sounds of words.

The pronunciation that bothers me most is one that I shouldn’t really be fussed about at all. It is the shift in the pronunciation of worry which used to rhyme with hurry but now rhymes, more and more, with sorry.

This word has had various forms and pronunciations in its history in the English language. It started out as an Old English word wyrgan meaning ‘to strangle’ (from which we got the idea of the dog worrying the sheep, from which we got the notion of feeling upset and anxious). Read more…

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The Editor’s take on the Word of the Year 2016

My father was trained as a journalist in the days when newspapers cared about their reputations as disseminators of information that was accurate and reliable. It wasn’t just a legal anxiety, it was an organisational pride in the quality of their news reporting. He told me that you can’t half-know something. You either know it or you don’t. Read more…

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Lewis Carroll’s coinages

Lewis Carroll contributed some of the most inspirational writing in history to the world. With his remarkable manipulation of language, he captured the imaginations not only of children, but of aspiring writers, readers and everyone else who came in contact with his word. Read more…

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What’s your Word of the Year?

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…

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