Here’s a good question: what is the last word in the dictionary?
That probably sends you off to check the desk dictionary beside you, but the answer depends on which dictionary you are looking at, at the time.
So, let’s look at a few, and see what we find.
In the Oxford English Dictionary, the last entry is, in fact, a number—it’s the British emergency telephone number 999 (it was set up in 1937, and us the last entry in the OED is from that date).
It’s the equivalent of Australia’s 000 or America’s 911.
But if we leave out the number, the last word in the Oxford is ‘zyzzyva’ which is a genus of tropical weevil (the word is recorded from 1922).
The Oxford adds the helpful note that this is ‘Reputed to have been invented to be the last entry in alphabetical dictionaries, although evidence to support this appears to be lacking.’
In other words, the zoologists who were naming this particular evil weevil deliberately invented a name so full of Zs and Ys that it would force its way to the very last place in the dictionary.
But other dictionaries give other answers.
The big American dictionary the Merriam-Webster lists ‘zyzzogeton’ last of all (which it says is ‘a genus of large South American leafhoppers’).
Doctor Johnson’s majestic, landmark, dictionary of 1755 listed ‘zootomy’ (‘the dissection of the bodies of beasts’) as its final entry.
The Macquarie Dictionary (Federal Edition, 2001) ends with ‘zzz’ meaning ‘a conventional representation of sleep or the sound of snoring, used especially by cartoonists.’
And the Australian National Dictionary (second edition, 2016) runs with ‘zygomaturus’ as its final item (this, it appears, is the ‘bony arch on each side of the skull in vertebrates’).
So, they don’t exactly agree on where the end should be.
But clearly, some verbal entity somewhere has to have the last word!
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If you'd like to see my A-Z list of Aussie slang, you'll find it here in the Australian Geographic website -- A-Z list of Aussie slang. Here’s the link: The A-Z of Aussie slang - Australian Geographic
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