Word.ws English Dictionary

fair dinkum

More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations

Australia[ˌfeː ˈdɪŋ.kəm]

fair dinkum adjective: genuine, honest, fair and square.

Adjective

fair dinkum (not comparable)

  1. (Australia, slang) Genuine, honest, fair and square.
    • Are you fair dinkum?
    • I mean, if they were out at a concert or something, or if they were involved in some other out-of-school social activity and some fair dinkum Aussie bloke, with a fair dinkum Aussie accent, and a fair dinkum Aussie hat, preferably chewing on a fair dinkum gum leaf, and holding a koala bear in one...2002, John Dutch, April and Anderson, page 63

Adverb

fair dinkum (not comparable)

  1. (Australia, slang) Truly, honestly.
    • She checked what he had produced against the diagram in her book, smiled and said, “Fair dinkum, you really do teach maths,” which took Daniel a little by surprise as he wasn’t sure what “fair dinkum” meant, but as it was accompanied by a smile he assumed it was some form of approval.1991, Jeffrey Archer, As the Crow Flies, Pan Macmillan, published 2004, unnumbered page
    • Fair dinkum, I'm being straight up with you now, I could have hit him.1995, Edward Berridge, The Lives of the Saints, page 33

Examples of fair dinkum in a sentence

  • Of course, you'd get more of a fair dinkum picture if you were able to interview members of the Wilson family but that would be darned near impossible.’2007, Barbara Hartmann King, Coloured Sands, page 55:
  • Kevin, fair dinkum mate, you've got to put your boot into the ball, you're too slow to do all this finessin'.2004, Sally Warhaft, Well May We Say: The Speeches That Made Australia, page 466:

Synonyms of fair dinkum

All synonyms of fair dinkum

Origin of fair dinkum

see dinkum.

Words formed from fair dinkum

Questions about fair dinkum

What does fair dinkum mean?
Fair dinkum means genuine, honest, fair and square.
How do you use fair dinkum in a sentence?
Of course, you'd get more of a fair dinkum picture if you were able to interview members of the Wilson family but that would be darned near impossible.’
What part of speech is fair dinkum?
Fair dinkum can be an adjective or an adverb.
How do you pronounce fair dinkum?
Fair dinkum is pronounced [ˌfeː ˈdɪŋ.kəm] (Australia).

Words near fair dinkum in the dictionary

  1. fair cops
  2. fair copy
  3. fair crack of the whip
  4. fair dealing
  5. fair dinks
  6. fair dinkum
  7. fair division
  8. fair divisions
  9. fair do's
  10. fair doos
  11. fair dos

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: fair dinkum (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: EN-AU ck1 fair dinkum.ogg.

Cite this entry: “fair dinkum.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/fair_dinkum. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.