As we collected words from the pandemic and talked about them on the radio and in the media, we at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC) continued to source words for The Australian National Dictionary (AND), our dictionary of Australianisms on historical principles. AND tells the story of Australia through its words, with each entry supported by a history told through quotations. These are carefully selected to convey not only the full sense of how a word is used but also to say something about the way the word illustrates a broader aspect of Australia’s story.

Words for the environment – flora and fauna – loom large in our lexicon, and ANDC’s reading program, which seeks to both identify new words and locate new quotations for old ones, takes in a lot of reading about the Australian environment. As I have been undertaking this reading, I have found that the books I read and the quotations I collect are increasingly speaking not only to the climate crisis but also to climate grief.

Climate grief is defined by Jonica Newby in her recent book Beyond Climate Grief: A journey of love, snow, fire and an enchanted beer can (2021) in this way: ‘the awful sense of loss for a heart place that is still there but distressingly altered’. The term is not exclusively Australian; it is part of an international language of climate change-related terms. But it has become much more prominent in our language and awareness since 2019.

Climate grief is a particularly evocative term, and while Newby’s book is very much devoted to finding ways to cope with climate grief, and how we might not become overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness, it is the concept that lingered with me after reading it. It feels as if climate grief – more so than climate activism perhaps – will be what will find its way into AND. For example, I recently took a quotation for the term Bramble Cay melomys. While melomys is currently an entry in the dictionary, we don’t specifically include this species. Yet now that it is officially extinct, and as this animal is the first to be declared extinct as a result of human-induced climate change, it surely now deserves an entry of its own.

Numerous quotations I have taken recently for various Australian terms also speak to the way change to the environment as we know it is taking place. For example, a recent quotation collected for King Billy pine – a variant of King William pine, a Tasmanian tree for which the first printed evidence for the name dates to 1866 – mentions the potential for its extinction. Aaron Smith in The Rock (2020), a memoir of his time editing the Torres News, writes: ‘Yet due to droughts and bushfires driven by climate change, and the clear-felling of old-growth forests, the King Billy pine is verging on extinction.’ In Beyond Climate Grief, Newby provides our most recent quotation for snow country, capturing the way we might be already anticipating future losses: ‘Losing the Great Barrier Reef. The world’s snow retreating. The loss, ultimately, possibly (probably?) of Australia’s beautiful snow country.’

My recent reading of the powerful collection Living With the Anthropocene (2020), edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner, and Jenny Newell, also threw up a number of quotations that might add to AND’s story about our changing environment. One of these, taken from Saskia Beudel’s contribution, is for the term greenie, an Australianism applied to, in the words of the dictionary, ‘any of a number of several predominantly green birds or animals’. She conveys a haunting sense of loss: ‘Most unnerving is the absence of small native birds once common here: the silvereyes and small honeyeaters called greenies.’

We include words in AND because they meet a specific set of criteria – most notably, that a word, or sense of a word, is Australian or has special significance in Australia. Much of the language of climate change is international and so will not be captured in a dictionary such as this, but what will find its way into our entries and so into the record of Australian English is the quotation evidence that reveals the changes to the continent that are taking place.

The next book on my pile of reading for the dictionary is the edited collection Fire Flood Plague: Australian writers respond to 2020. What words might be added for consideration for the Australian National Dictionary and what new quotations might add to the story of old ones, I don’t yet know, but I suspect I will find further evidence of how the uncertain times we live in are shaping our language.