Raymond Alen
Australians, or Aussies as they call themselves, use a lot of slang in oral communication. Oftentimes these are abbreviations of some words, even phrases. If you know someone from Australia, or if you googled something about slot machines in Australia, you must have stumbled upon the word “pokie.”
In case you still don’t understand what this is, don’t give up now! We’re going to help you understand Aussie slang. We’re also going to try and explain how they make abbreviations.
Common Australian Slang Phrases
We’ll start with the easy one: “G’ day,” which is “Good day.” When something is excellent, they say, “Bonza.” Instead of the afternoon, Aussies say “arvo.” Additionally, “s’arvo” means “this afternoon.” If someone is behaving foolishly, they might be called a “Drongo.”
Everybody else calls McDonald’s just like that, but people in Australia have another name for it — Maccas.
In case you were wondering what “Cuppa” means, it means “a cup of tea.” They succeeded in abbreviating a phrase into one word. If you are calling for a cup of tea in the afternoon, Aussies would call some for a cuppa.
Now that you know more about their slang, we can go further and talk about pokies.
Many Meanings of “Pokie”
If you searched the term “pokie” on the internet recently, chances are you found numerous meanings for this word. For instance, it can mean prison, cigarettes, and so on. It has some other meanings that we don’t feel comfortable sharing right now. If you say talk about these meanings in front of your friends they might think you are an impolite person.
Australian “Pokie”
When it comes to poker machines in the Australian states, this form of gambling has acquired a different name than in the rest of the world. In Australia and New Zealand, a pokie is a fruit machine, pokie machine or gambling machine. There is no difference between spinning reels of a regular slot machine and a pokie somewhere in local pubs and clubs. Even though the origin of the word pokie is unknown so far, we can guess that it got the name by abbreviating “poker machine.”
In the past, when gamblers started using the word “pokie,” slot machines were totally different from the gambling machines that we have today,
Bearing in mind that Aussies abbreviate everything they can to save time, for example, Australia is “Straya,” and mosquitoes are “mozzies.” Knowing now that pokies in Australia are more similar to slot machines, and not poker games, you can imagine why people have a hard time understanding what a “pokie” is.
We cannot say with certainty when this word was first used. There’s a theory that at the beginning of the 20th century the first game that was able to be played at Australian casinos was a poker machine (we must point out that this is not a poker machine in the traditional sense). Over time slot machines gained in popularity, but it seems like it was much easier for Australian to call them pokies as well.
