Word.ws English Dictionary

southerly buster

southerly buster noun: a summer cold front which works its way up the coast, bringing strong cool southerly winds that replaces and relieves hot conditions.

Noun

southerly buster (plural southerly busters)

  1. (Australia, New-South-Wales, Western) A summer cold front which works its way up the coast, bringing strong cool southerly winds that replaces and relieves hot conditions.
    • It is almost a corollary, that the evening of a hot-wind day brings up a ‘southerly buster’, as we have heard the vulgar call it, very chill indeed ... as this wind comes from the southerly region of the Australian Alps.1850, B. C. Peck, Recollections of Sydney, quoted in 1978, G. A. Wilkes, A Dictionary of Australian Colloquialisms, →ISBN
    • We sighted land with a strong gale blowing, and on reaching Fremantle found no less than six ships hard and fast ashore; the harbour, unfortunately, is exposed to the full force of what is known in those parts as a "Southerly Buster," and huge green rollers were tumbling and tossing in all...1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 197

Forms of southerly buster

pluralsoutherly busters

Questions about southerly buster

What does southerly buster mean?
Southerly buster means a summer cold front which works its way up the coast, bringing strong cool southerly winds that replaces and relieves hot conditions.
What part of speech is southerly buster?
Southerly buster is a noun.
What is the plural of southerly buster?
The plural of southerly buster is southerly busters.

Words near southerly buster in the dictionary

  1. Southerland
  2. Southerlands
  3. southerlies
  4. southerliness
  5. southerly
  6. southerly buster
  7. southerly busters
  8. southermost
  9. southern
  10. Southern Africa
  11. Southern African

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: southerly buster (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-southerly buster.ogg.

Cite this entry: “southerly buster.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/southerly_buster. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.