A common Australian term of friendship, the equivalent of British ‘mate’, American ‘buddy’. Partridge, in his Dictionary of Historical Slang, says that the term was in use at race-tracks by 1900. He derives it from Yiddish...

Mate is a colloquialism used to refer to a friend and is commonly used in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Ireland. It is or has been used interchangeably with many equivalent terms, such as buddy (originally United...