Aussie
More pronunciations (2)Fewer pronunciations
Australia/ˈɔzi/New Zealand/ˈɒzi/
Aussie proper noun: a diminutive of the male given names Austin, Osborn, or Oswald.
Proper noun
Aussie
- A diminutive of the male given names Austin, Osborn, or Oswald.
- A diminutive of the female given names Augusta or Austina.
- the nation or continent of Australia (now uncommon except in sporting chants and in New Zealand).
- An Australian (person).
- An Australian Shepherd dog.
- The Australian dollar.
Adjective
Aussie (not generally comparable, comparative more Aussie, superlative most Aussie)
- Australian.
- From the Marvel Mixmaster to the Miracle Microwave, every time a new-fangled gadget has lobbed into the Aussie kitchen, Aussie mums have changed their cooking styles accordingly.1987, Kerry Cue, Hang On To Your Horses Doovers, page 5
- Most Aussie officers seemed this way to me; always cool, deliberate, and extremely rational in their decision making, a far cry from the American leadership I had seen during my first year in the army.1998, Gordon L. Steinbrook, Allies and Mates: An American Soldier with the Australians and New Zealanders in Vietnam 1966-1967, page 63
Examples of Aussie in a sentence
- They’re the “Almost Aussies” who embrace their new culture with a vengeance – some becoming more Aussie than Aussies.2008, Lois Nicholls, Aussie, Actually, page 111:
- You couldn’t get more Aussie than the cast he chose—or their cars.2008, Janet Fife-Yeomans, Heath: A Family's Tale, page 65:
- “I’m a perfectionist, mate,” he said, his accent becoming noticeably more Aussie, as it always did in private.2010, Quintin Jardine, Screen Savers, unnumbered page:
- Go to Cronulla Beach Sunday for some Leb and wog bashing Aussie Pride ok.”2015, Johnny Lieu, “Cronulla Riots: What happened on one of Australia's darkest days”, in Mashable:
Forms of Aussie
| comparative | more Aussie |
|---|---|
| superlative | most Aussie |
Origin of Aussie
From a clipping of Australian (or Australia) + -ie. The spelling likely adopted the visual template of the pre‐existing personal diminutive Aussie (from Austin or Augusta). However, while the personal nickname retains standard English phonics with a voiceless /s/, the pronunciation of the national slang (/ˈɒzi/) was driven by a highly productive morphophonological template in Commonwealth slang that strongly favors short stressed vowels and lenited consonants. The clipped base promotes the historically unstressed initial vowel to the short /ɒ/. This reflects a broader Commonwealth phonological rule where the /ɔː/ typically associated with the ⟨au⟩ digraph is shortened before a tautosyllabic /s/ or /s/‐cluster (as in austral). To lock in this short vowel on the page and prevent readers from reverting to an open‐syllable pronunciation, writers doubled the s as a structural dummy consonant. This created an orthographic trap. The spelling effectively represents a conservative /ˈɔːsi/, preserving the standard phonetic values of both the long vowel and the voiceless fricative. However, the egalitarian colloquial register actively demanded the lenited (voiced) /z/ (compare Tassie...
Words formed from Aussie
- Aussie box
- Aussie burger
- Aussie cozzie
- Aussie dollar
- Aussie kiss
- Aussie rules
- Aussie salute
Phrases with Aussie
Words that rhyme with Aussie
Questions about Aussie
- What does Aussie mean?
- Aussie means a diminutive of the male given names Austin, Osborn, or Oswald.
- How do you use Aussie in a sentence?
- They’re the “Almost Aussies” who embrace their new culture with a vengeance – some becoming more Aussie than Aussies.
- What part of speech is Aussie?
- Aussie can be a proper noun or an adjective.
- How do you pronounce Aussie?
- Aussie is pronounced /ˈɔzi/ (Australia).
Words near Aussie in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Aussie (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-Aussie.wav.
Cite this entry: “Aussie.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/aussie. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.