News location:

Canberra Today 16°/23° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

The new word of the year is characteristically ‘Aussie’

THIS year’s “Word of the Year” is described as being “characteristically Aussie”, according to senior researcher Mark Gwynn, who is part of the team at the Australian National Dictionary Centre. 

The centre undertakes research into Australian English in partnership with Oxford University Press Australia and New Zealand, and edits Oxford’s Australian dictionaries, and in a year dominated by COVID-19, the centre, based at the ANU, has chosen “iso” as its Word of the Year from a very long list of pandemic-related terms. According to the centre, “iso” means:

“Iso: self-isolation; the act of remaining apart from others as a way to limit the

spread of an infectious disease, especially as a public health measure.” 

Every year the centre picks a word or expression that has gained prominence in the Australian social landscape, and Mr Gwynn says that among the hundreds of pandemic-related terms collected by the centre, iso stood out as a characteristically Aussie abbreviation.

“Our fondness for abbreviating words in Australia, and a natural human inclination to make the unknown and scary familiar, quickly saw the descriptive term ‘self-isolation’ shortened to iso in March this year,” Mr Gwynn says.

“Not only is iso distinctively Australian in usage, it has also been linguistically productive by combining with other words to form compounds such as iso baking, iso bar, iso cut and iso fashion.

“Many of us found humour in language use as a way to cope with our changed working and social circumstances, so why not talk about a bad self-inflicted haircut as an iso cut, or the extra weight gained due to lack of exercise as iso kilos.”

The words on the shortlist reflect the impact of the pandemic, with only one word chosen that was not related to the virus and its effects.

The full shortlist includes:

  • “Black Summer”: the summer of 2019/2020, during which catastrophic bushfires occurred in southeastern Australia.
  • “bubble”: a district, region, or a group of people viewed as a closed system, isolating from other districts, regions, or groups as a public health measure to limit the spread of COVID-19. ‘Bubble’ was also found in compounds such as “travel bubble”, “germ bubble” and “sporting bubble”.
  • “covid-normal”: a state of adapting to an acceptable level of COVID-19 in the community.
  • “driveway”: used in compounds referring to individual Anzac Day vigils in 2020, such as “driveway Anzac service”, “driveway dawn service”.

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Share this

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews