Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases and Usages with Those Aboriginal-Australian and Maori Words Which Have Become Incorporated in the Language, and the Commoner Scientific Words That Have Had Their Origin in Australasia

A dictionary of a language being born. Edward Ellis Morris compiled this volume in 1898 to capture English as it evolved in isolation on the opposite side of the world from its source. The result is a remarkable artifact: a record of British settlers grappling with an alien landscape, naming creatures and plants that existed nowhere else in the Anglophone world, and absorbing words from Aboriginal Australian and Māori languages that had no English equivalents. Here you'll find 'kangaroo' alongside its adopted Māori neighbor 'kiwi,' alongside the peculiar local adaptations of English that emerged when colonists needed vocabulary for their new reality. Morris began this work as a contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary but expanded it into something more ambitious: a portrait of a linguistic ecosystem in the process of formation. For anyone curious about how languages change, how cultures collide and merge, or simply how the Antipodes gave English words it never knew it needed, this dictionary offers a window into a pivotal moment when colonial speech became something entirely its own.