Australian Words in English Dictionaries

Sarah Ogilvie is a linguist and lexicographer at the University of Oxford. She has recently co-edited the Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World (Elsevier 2009, with Keith Brown).

Australian words have fascinated the rest of the world ever since the first Europeans set foot on our land, but they only made it into dictionaries relatively late. Initial contact between England and Australia came too late for Australian words to be included in early dictionaries such as Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabetical (1604), Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1724), and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755). But Johnson was good friends with Sir Joseph Banks, and soon after Banks returned to England with news of the Guugu Yimidhirr word kangaroo, which he had collected while the Endeavour was stranded at Cooktown for seven weeks in 1770, Johnson introduced the word to British high society by impersonating the animal at a dinner party. 'Nothing could be more ludicrous', wrote Boswell, 'than the appearance of a tall, heavy, grave-looking man, like Dr Johnson, standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo. He stood erect, put out his hands like feelers, and, gathering up the tails of his huge brown coat so as to resemble the pouch of the animal, made two or three vigorous bounds across the room'.

Webster's dictionary

The first dictionary to include Australian words was Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Although many Australian words were missing (boomerang, dingo, koala),  Webster included entries for kangaroo, platypus, quoll, wombat, as well as surprising words such as vampire, defined as an Australian 'species of large bat', and a sense of rude meaning 'ignorant; untaught; savage; barbarous; as the rude natives of America or of New Holland'. Webster never once used the words 'Australia' or 'Australian' in his dictionary. As was common in the early nineteenth century, he preferred the name 'New Holland', an anglicization of the name used by Dutch navigators in the seventeenth century. To help his readers understand what the Australian words signified, Webster made the strange familiar, and his definitions were delightfully 'American' in their expression and points of reference: kangaroo is defined as 'resembling in some respects the opossum', and quoll as 'resembling the polecat'.

Colonial impurities

The main reason why Australian words were neglected in so many nineteenth-century dictionaries was that lexicographers lacked access to our words because they lacked access to our literature, and all dictionaries depend on written sources for their evidence. If lexicographers wanted to include Australian words, they needed actively to seek readers of Australian texts in Australia. Not only was this beyond the resources and vision of some British lexicographers, such as Charles Richardson who published A New Dictionary of the English Language in 1837 without a single Australian word, but it also may have challenged their view of the 'purity' of the English language which, many nineteenth-century scholars argued, was being 'corrupted' by the emergence and stabilization of Australian English and other colonial Englishes.

The first British dictionary to include Australian words was John Ogilvie's Imperial Dictionary (1848) but this was largely because Ogilvie's text was based on Webster's rather than any deliberate effort on his part. Australian words were not included in British dictionaries in any deliberate and comprehensive way until Sir James Murray's A New English Dictionary (1884-1928, later known as Oxford English Dictionary (OED)). Murray was intent on producing a dictionary that included all English not just British English. His first task, when he became chief editor of the OED in 1879, was to seek international readers for the Dictionary. Before he published any of the Dictionary, he wrote An Appeal to the English-speaking and the English-reading Public in Great Britain, America, and the Colonies in which he specifically asked people around the world to read local texts and send in quotations.

Antipodean readers

Hundreds of readers responded, including Edward Sugden (1854-1935) and Edward Morris (1843-1902) in Melbourne, both of whom - over a period of forty years - sent in thousands of quotations. In the 1890s, Morris, who had moved from being Headmaster of Melbourne Grammar School to join Sugden at the University of Melbourne, realised that he had collected enough quotations to compile his own dictionary of Australian and New Zealand English. He published Austral English in 1898 and sent duplicates of all his quotations to the OED. He wrote in its preface 'Dr Murray several years ago invited assistance from this end of the world for words and uses of words peculiar to Australasia, or to parts of it. In answer to his call I began to collect...The work took time, and when my parcel of quotations had grown into a considerable heap, it occurred to me that the collection, if a little further trouble were expended upon it, might first enjoy an independent existence'.

Murray also drew on the resources of individuals with significant private collections, including the Australian publisher and book collector Edward Augustus Petherick (1847-1917) who had the world's largest collection of Australian books (housed now in the Australian National Library where a reading room is named after him). Petherick moved from Melbourne to London in 1870 as manager of George Robertson Booksellers and the Colonial Booksellers Agency, returning to Australia in 1908. During this time, he was in correspondence with Murray and provided important etymological information on Australian words. Petherick's researches enabled Murray to determine particular Australian senses of words such as bail up,  to secure a cow while milking, and (said of bushrangers) to rob travellers, and to provide detailed and exhaustive etymologies for Australian words such as boomerang.

Morris, Sugden, and Petherick are just three of hundreds of readers from around the world who read local texts for Murray and sent in quotations for the OED. They are the unsung heroes of the OED, without whom the Dictionary would have been no different from its predecessors. They helped produce a text that remained unsurpassed in its breadth and quality of coverage of general Australian words until the publication of distinctly Australian dictionaries such as the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary and the Heinemann Australian Dictionary in the 1970s, and the Macquarie Dictionary and the Australian National Dictionary in the 1980s.

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