Blackgin
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 An Aboriginal woman. Australia, derogatory
"[…] a man has got to go on day after day, week after week, year after year, fighting devils of loneliness and worse—with nothing to look at except miles and miles of stark staring gum trees and black, smelling gidgee and dead-finish scrub—and never the glimpse of a woman—not counting black gins—to remind him he once had a mother and might have a wife."
- 2 The plant Kingia australis.
Example
More examples"[…] a man has got to go on day after day, week after week, year after year, fighting devils of loneliness and worse—with nothing to look at except miles and miles of stark staring gum trees and black, smelling gidgee and dead-finish scrub—and never the glimpse of a woman—not counting black gins—to remind him he once had a mother and might have a wife."
Etymology
From black + Dharug dyin (“woman”) (David Nash, "Placenames evidence for NSW pidgin" in Felicity Meakins, Carmel O'Shannessy (eds) Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages Since Colonization, Walter de Gruyter, 2016, p.133.) https://books.google.ca/books?id=spjUCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=%22blackgin%22&source=bl&ots=PAH4wZMnI1&sig=6pQWiSTFpQV6FcU9ZFhRzaTkbbQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwim-YfEg9vMAhUK-GMKHccqA_0Q6AEI5AEwLw#v=onepage&q=%22blackgin%22&f=false
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.