Maccas

Maccas is Australian slang for McDonald’s. “Want to grab Maccas?” is about as Australian as a late-night question gets.

What Maccas means

It’s the restaurant, the food and the trip, all in one word: you go to Maccas, you get Maccas, you eat Maccas in the car. Wiktionary records it as slang in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, spelled Maccas or Macca’s. You’ll hear a “Maccas run” (a quick drive to get some) and a “Maccas breakfast.”

Examples

• “I’m starving. Maccas run?”
• “Meet you at the Maccas near the station.”
• “We stopped at Maccas on the drive up, obviously.”

Where it came from

It follows the standard Australian way of making a nickname: shorten the word, add an ending, here -s. “Macca” is also a common nickname for anyone whose surname starts with Mc or Mac.

The company embraced it. According to Wikipedia’s article on Australian diminutives, McDonald’s Australia has registered Macca’s as a trademark and uses it in its own branding, and news reports in January 2013 announced that McDonald’s would “become Macca’s” in Australia. It’s one of the clearest examples of a brand adopting the nickname customers gave it.

Related terms

• Servo: a service station, the other road-trip stop.
• Bottle-o: a bottle shop.
• Arvo: afternoon.
• Brekkie: breakfast.

See more terms like this in our Australian slang guide.