Aussie Slang for Food: The Dated History

Food words with a paper trail

Australians have a lot of names for what is on the plate, and most of them can be dated. Using the evidence in Green’s Dictionary of Slang, this guide follows Australian food slang from the 1830s to the 1970s.

A caution first. The earliest recorded example only shows what someone wrote down first, so treat each date as “no later than”, not “invented in”.

The colonial years: tucker, tuck-out and lollies

Tucker is the big one. Green’s earliest example is from a Launceston (Tasmania) newspaper in 1833, which calls it “the slang word for a meal”. The earliest example Green’s tags as Australian is Bell’s Life in Sydney in 1861. It treats the word as an extension of “tuck”, which began as the rations of 19th-century gold-diggers.

Tuck-out, a feast or hearty meal, started in British writing in 1823, and its first Australian example is Bell’s Life in Sydney in 1845.

Lollies means sweets, and Green’s tags it Australian. It is short for “lollipop”, and its first example is the Adelaide Times of 14 July 1851.

Chook is usually Australian and New Zealand, and it is a clipping of “chicken”. Green’s earliest example is William Howitt’s 1855 book Land, Labour and Gold, which uses the spelling “chucky”.

Smoko is a work break, along with the tea or food that goes with it. Green’s tags it Aus./N.Z., builds it from “smoke” plus the “-o” ending, and finds a first example in a Melbourne magazine in 1865, where the writer talks about “smoke oh!” time.

1890s to 1940s: sangers, snags and bush bread

Sanger (also sanga) is a sandwich. Green’s tags it Aus./Ire., and its first example is the Sydney Truth of 11 February 1894.

Snags, meaning sausages, is tagged Aus./N.Z. and is rarely used in the singular. Green’s first example is the Perth Western Mail in 1937.

Damper, the simple bush bread, even picked up nicknames. Green’s records “woppidown” for a damper in 1941 and “dorkum” in 1943, both in a dictionary of Australian slang by S.J. Baker, and it is unsure of the origin of both.

The shortening habit: brekkie and sammo

Australians shorten everything, and food is no exception. Brekkie (also brekky) is tagged Ireland, Australia, UK and Scotland in Green’s, and its very earliest example is James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. Its first Australian example is a Barry Humphries comic strip, dated 1963–74. The longer “brekker” appears in an Australian diary on 7 March 1915.

Sammo, a sandwich, is tagged Aus./US, with its first example in A. Chipper’s 1972 Aussie Swearers Guide, which has a “sammo (or sango) merchant”, a hearty eater of sandwiches. Brekkie and sammo are good examples of the “-o” and “-ie” habit we explain in how Aussies make slang.

What the dates tell us

Several of the oldest food words start with gold-diggers and rations, such as tucker, tuck-out and lollies, and are tied to Australia’s colonial life. Smoko, lollies and sammo show the habit of clipping a long word and adding a friendly ending, and chook shows how an ordinary English word was reshaped by Australian speech.

The most surprising date is brekkie, which is not an Australian word first. Joyce used it in Dublin in 1922, decades before the first Australian example Green’s has.

Want to test yourself? In Aussie-fy, our daily game, you spot the genuine Aussie slang for an everyday word, and the archive has every past round. We have also traced the dates for money slang and words for being drunk.

Sources

All dates and region tags come from Green’s Dictionary of Slang: tucker, tuck-out, lollies, chook, smoko, sanger, snags, woppidown, dorkum, brekkie, brekker, sammo.