See wowser in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for wowser meaning in English (8.0kB)
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"etymology_text": "From UK dialect. In the pro-temperance sense, Australian from early 1900s.\nJohn Norton, an early enemy of wowsers (temperance sense), claimed it to be an acronym for \"We Only Want Social Evils Remedied\", but that is likely a folk etymology.\nA story has it that gospellers in the streets of Clunes, Victoria in the 1870s were called rousers but one of the town councillors had a speech impediment and couldn't pronounce his \"R\"s, thus giving wowser. (Reference: Bill Wannan, Australian Folklore, Lansdowne Press, 1970, reprint 1979 →ISBN, under \"Wowser\", page 568.)",
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"ref": "1950, Neville Shute, chapter 9, in A Town Like Alice, London: The Reprint Society, published 1952, page 259",
"text": "“I’d like to come with you one day up to the top end,” she said. “I suppose it’ll have to be after we’re married.”\nHe grinned. “Plenty of wowsers back in Willstown to talk about it, if you came before.”",
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{
"ref": "1996, Janette Turner Hospital, Oyster, paperback edition, Virago Press, page 65",
"text": "As for the rest, the pay is not bad, coming as it does from the pockets of the three local warlords who hired me: two graziers, one of whom is also a terrible wowser (everyone calls him 'Mr Prophet', though I call him - privately, of course - Mr Brimstone, or Old Blood-and-Thunderguts); the third is the owner of the pub.",
"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "1999, Anna E. Blainey, “The prohibition and total abstinence movement in Australia, 1880 - 1910”, in Robert Dare, editor, Food, Power and Community, page 142",
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{
"ref": "2010, Robert Cettl, Offensive to a Reasonable Adult: Film Censorship and Classification in 'Secular' Australia, page 43",
"text": "Quite simply, to a wowser, adults should not be allowed to see, hear and read as they wished, but should only be allowed to see hear and read that which fully conforms to Australia's Christian heritage[…].",
"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "2012, Deborah Burrows, A Stranger in my Street",
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"ref": "1968 -, Squire Omar Barker, Rawhide Rhymes: Singing Poems of the Old West, page 10",
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"ref": "2010, David J. Vanderpool, Pencil Drawings: A look into drawing Portraits",
"text": "WOWSER - Absolutely beautiful rendering - a mastrpiece work",
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"ref": "1950, Neville Shute, chapter 9, in A Town Like Alice, London: The Reprint Society, published 1952, page 259",
"text": "“I’d like to come with you one day up to the top end,” she said. “I suppose it’ll have to be after we’re married.”\nHe grinned. “Plenty of wowsers back in Willstown to talk about it, if you came before.”",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1996, Janette Turner Hospital, Oyster, paperback edition, Virago Press, page 65",
"text": "As for the rest, the pay is not bad, coming as it does from the pockets of the three local warlords who hired me: two graziers, one of whom is also a terrible wowser (everyone calls him 'Mr Prophet', though I call him - privately, of course - Mr Brimstone, or Old Blood-and-Thunderguts); the third is the owner of the pub.",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "1999, Anna E. Blainey, “The prohibition and total abstinence movement in Australia, 1880 - 1910”, in Robert Dare, editor, Food, Power and Community, page 142",
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"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2010, Robert Cettl, Offensive to a Reasonable Adult: Film Censorship and Classification in 'Secular' Australia, page 43",
"text": "Quite simply, to a wowser, adults should not be allowed to see, hear and read as they wished, but should only be allowed to see hear and read that which fully conforms to Australia's Christian heritage[…].",
"type": "quotation"
},
{
"ref": "2012, Deborah Burrows, A Stranger in my Street",
"text": "He's a bit of a prig. A wowser. Very Methodist.",
"type": "quotation"
}
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"One with strong moral views against excessive consumption of alcohol, gambling, pornography, etc., who seeks to promulgate those views."
],
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"ref": "1968 -, Squire Omar Barker, Rawhide Rhymes: Singing Poems of the Old West, page 10",
"text": "In size the wowser varies, for no matter where he's at, He takes up all the room there is— just like a cowboy's hat.",
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"type": "quotation"
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{
"ref": "2010, David J. Vanderpool, Pencil Drawings: A look into drawing Portraits",
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"ref": "2013, Gregory E. Burchett, Missing The Links, page 241",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-04-24 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (82c8ff9 and f4967a5). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.