Chunder

Part of speech: verb

Pronunciation: /ˈtʃandə/

Definitions

To forcibly eject the contents of the stomach from the mouth while making a distinct sound often associated with distress
To expel stomach contents through the mouth typically accompanied by a loud noise
The act of throwing up usually involving a characteristic retching sound

Etymology: Early in the twentieth century, Australians leafing through their papers kept meeting a cartoon figure called Chunder Loo of Akim Foo. He existed to sell Cobra boot polish. He was drawn by Norman Lindsay, later one of the country's most celebrated and most scandalous artists, and the comic writer Ernest O'Ferrall wrote verse about him. That a boot-polish mascot might have given Australia its favourite word for being sick is the best-known story in the word's history. It may even be true. The theory runs like this. In rhyming slang, a word is replaced by a phrase that rhymes with it, and the phrase is then clipped, the way Cockney "pork pies" for lies became "porkies." The character's name rhymes with "spew," so "Chunder Loo" could have served as slang for vomiting and then shrunk to its first half. The Australian National Dictionary Centre allows that this is possibly the source. The difficulty is that nobody has ever found the full rhyming phrase used to mean "spew." The mechanism is plausible, but the crucial link is missing. A second story is more colourful and almost certainly false. It holds that on ships carrying emigrants out to Australia, a seasick passenger at the rail would shout "Watch under!" to warn anyone on the deck below, and that the cry wore down into a single word. It is a tidy picture, but no one has ever recorded the phrase, and it has every mark of a folk etymology: an explanation invented to fit a word after the fact. Quieter possibilities come from British dialect. "Tunder" was a regional pronunciation of thunder, which suits the noise if nothing else. Scots had "junder," "junner" or "chunner," meaning to bump or knock against something, and also to break a vessel or spill what it held. These were frequentative forms of "jund" or "chund," to jog, jostle or upset. A word for spilling contents fits uncomfortably well. English dialect also had "chunter," recorded since the 1590s, meaning to grumble or mutter, and the two may have blurred together. Some dictionaries simply treat the word as expressive, a sound that seemed to suit what it described. Whatever its parentage, chunder first turns up in print around 1950 as Australian slang, though it was presumably said aloud for some time before anyone wrote it down. Britain learned it in the 1960s from Barry Humphries's comic strip about Barry McKenzie, the beer-sodden Australian abroad, in the satirical magazine Private Eye. In 1981 Men at Work put it into the chorus of "Down Under," describing a land "where beer does flow and men chunder." The very next line asks whether you can hear the thunder.

Synonyms: vomit, puke, retch, heave, spew

Antonyms: swallow, consume, ingest, digest, absorb