A university project to collect nicknames of Australian cities, towns and places has received 1,000 new entries for inclusion in the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC).
Senior Researcher at ANDC, Mark Gwynn said the Centre was inundated with responses from ‘Deni’ (Deniliquin) to ‘Rocky’ (Rockhampton) and everywhere in between.
“The response was enthusiastic and demonstrated the vast number of colloquial names for places across the country,” Mr Gwynn said.
“We’ve added more than 1,000 distinct names to our database,” he said.
“What was especially interesting were the similarities between the nickname patterns and other forms of word generation in Australia.”
“For example, the ‘y’ and ‘o’ endings found in words like ‘barbie’ for barbecue and ‘muso’ for musician, are also found in nicknames like ‘Goldy’ for Gold Coast, and ‘Paddo’ for Paddington,” Mr Gwynn said.
He said the name endings acted as a code of familiarity in Australian speech.
Mr Gwynn said plenty of tongue-in-cheek contributions were collected, including ‘Marry Your Brother’ for Maryborough and ‘Sheep Dunny Cow Dunny’ for Woolloomooloo.”
He said it wasn’t too late to become involved in the project.
Anyone who has a nickname they would like to add to the list can do so on the Centre’s web page at this PS News link.
