What it means
An old-school way to say mate or good friend, usually said with a bit of warmth and cheek. It feels very bush and old digger, so you’re more likely to hear it from older Aussies, in the country, or when someone’s putting on a vintage yarn-spinning voice. It suggests loyal, no-drama friendship, not just a casual acquaintance.
Usage examples
"Oi cobber, you still owe me a servo pie from yesterday arvo. Quit flappin and come have a yarn, esky’s chockers."
"My old cobber from the rugby team at Sydney University phoned me last Tuesday evening from his sheep station three hours north of Dubbo, the cousin of his wife had finally given birth to twin daughters and the whole extended family is now on the bus to Brisbane for the christening next month."
"The cobber at the next table at the country pub in the western district of Victoria offered to buy the next round when I mentioned that the team from the regional Australian rules football competition had won the local derby on the Saturday afternoon, and we ended up trading stories until closing time."
Where it comes from
Cobber is a quintessentially Australian word of disputed origin, with the most credible etymology tracing it to the Yiddish chaver, friend or comrade, brought to colonial Australia by the Jewish merchants and traders of London who emigrated in the eighteen-fifties and worked alongside Anglo-Saxon settlers in the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. An alternative theory links cobber to the British dialect verb cob, meaning to take a liking to someone, attested in Suffolk and Norfolk speech of the eighteen-hundreds. The word travelled into the Australian bush through the sheep-shearing camps of the late nineteenth century and reached global recognition during the First World War with the digger soldiers of the ANZAC corps.
Other ways to say it
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