boong
/bʊŋ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.35 in modern English
8
Scrabble Score
5
Letters
1
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "I heard Bruce tell one of the drinkers he'd bought a place in Queensland where you could ‘still call a Boong a Boong’."
- "‘[…]I quit the feds because I didn't want to be a showpiece boong cop.’"
- "“Yeah,” he said, “them boongs are a useless lot. The sooner they all die off, the better.” “And why is that?” Bill asked. “The Abos are nothing but a pack of boozers. All they wanna' do is get pissed.” The man glared at his beer. “Useless, they are.”"
- "A couple of boongs came down and carried me up to the hut where our R.A.P. corporal was."
- "During the War the soldiers generally referred to Papua New Guineans as “Boongs,” a name also given to black Americans. It is not a nice word, but is fair to say that the Aussies held the boongs in quite some affection during the War."
- "[Department of Information cameraman Damien] Parer's views on mateship encompassed both the Papuans and the soldiers: at one point he wrote ‘“no boongs, no battle”, implying that natives and diggers were equal partners in their fight against the Japanese.’⁷¹"
Etymology
Suggested sources are * Malay bung (“brother”), * Indonesian dialectal bung (“brother”) * A New Guinea native language * An Aboriginal Australian language. Previously the word Binghi was used widely in similar fashion to the present-day use of the term Negro for peoples of African ancestry; see titles from this booklist and also writings of Xavier Herbert (e.g. in Capricornia), for example.