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matilda

nounattested in dialogue

  • //məˈtɪldə//

A bundle of possessions, often tied up in a sack; a swag.

noun

  1. 1

    A bundle of possessions, often tied up in a sack; a swag.

    1906, A. B. Paterson, On The Road to Gundagai, The Old Bush Songs, Gutenberg eBook #10493, In a week the spree was over and the cheque was all knocked down, / So we shouldered our “Matildas,” and we turned our backs on town, / And the girls they stood a nobbler as we sadly said “Good bye,” / And we tramped from Lazy Harry’s, not five miles from Gundagai;

    When a hobo roams through the outback with a matilda on his back, he is said to be “waltzing matilda.”

Etymology

Unknown.

Forms

plural
matildas
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).