wharfie

wharfie noun: a wharf worker: synonym of dockworker.

Noun

wharfie (plural wharfies)

(Australia, New Zealand, colloquial, informal) A wharf worker: synonym of dockworker.
- “It’s a twenty-four-hour stoppage,” he said. “The wharfies went to the Arbitration Court for another pound a week for something or other, and they didn’t get it, so they’ve stopped work for a day to show their displeasure […]”1952, Neville Shute, chapter 9, in The Far Country, London: Heinemann
- One night, soon after the battle of the Coral Sea, the US transport ship Shenandoah steamed up the Brisbane River to the wharves at Hamilton. She tied up just before eleven o′clock and at midnight a fresh shift of wharfies began unloading her cavernous holds.2000, David Crookes, Someday Soon, unnumbered page

But a group of wharfies rushed the ballot box, opened it, and ripped up some voting slips and threw others over a fence.2008, Andrew Faulkner, Arthur Blackburn, VC: An Australian Hero, His Men, and Their Two World Wars, page 152:
In Fremantle the wharfies were crucial to my preselection.2009, Kim Edward Beazley, Father of the House: The Memoirs of Kim E. Beazley, page 131:

plural	wharfies

From wharf + -ie.

What does wharfie mean?: Wharfie means a wharf worker: synonym of dockworker.
How do you use wharfie in a sentence?: But a group of wharfies rushed the ballot box, opened it, and ripped up some voting slips and threw others over a fence.
What part of speech is wharfie?: Wharfie is a noun.
What is the plural of wharfie?: The plural of wharfie is wharfies.

Adapted from Wiktionary: wharfie (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: 2026-09-02

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-wharfie.ogg.

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