Donga vs Null - What's the difference?
donga | null |
(Australia) A transportable building with single rooms, often used on remote work sites or as tourist accommodation.
* 2004 , Susie Ashworth, Rebecca Turner, Simone Egger, Western Australia , Lonely Planet,
* 2004 , James Woodford, The Dog Fence ,
* 2009 , (editor), ''The Best Australian Essays 2009 ,
(South African English) A usually dry, eroded watercourse running only in times of heavy rain.
* 1900 , , Volume 2, 2008 Easyread Large Bold Edition,
* 1901 , , Charles Scribner’s Sons,
* 1948 , , In Search of South Africa , Methuen, page 168:
A non-existent or empty value or set of values.
Zero]] quantity of [[expression, expressions; nothing.
Something that has no force or meaning.
(computing) the ASCII or Unicode character (), represented by a zero value, that indicates no character and is sometimes used as a string terminator.
(computing) the attribute of an entity that has no valid value.
One of the beads in nulled work.
(statistics) null hypothesis
Having no validity, "null and void"
insignificant
* 1924 , Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove :
absent or non-existent
(mathematics) of the null set
(mathematics) of or comprising a value of precisely zero
(genetics, of a mutation) causing a complete loss of gene function, amorphic.
As nouns the difference between donga and null
is that donga is (australia) a transportable building with single rooms, often used on remote work sites or as tourist accommodation or donga can be (south african english) a usually dry, eroded watercourse running only in times of heavy rain while null is zero, nil; the cardinal number before einn.donga
English
(wikipedia donga)Etymology 1
Noun
(en noun)page 152,
- Menzies Hotel' ([Ph] 9024 2043; 22 Shenton St; s/d $48/65, '''donga''' $75) has old-style hotel rooms as well as - for that real goldfields experience - ' dongas (temporary miner?s abode, usually made from corrugated iron), and also serves all meals.
page 225,
- He not only expects his fence to be perfect, he also expects his dongas to be the best workman?s huts in Australia, and that is what they are.
page 118,
- Workers building roads in the bush sleep in dongas like these and are well paid for their discomfort.
Usage notes
* Usually used in outback Australia, especially the northwest.Etymology 2
From the Nguni group of languages. A washed out ravine or gully.Noun
(en noun)page 14:
- Major Pack-Beresford and other officers were shot down, and every unhorsed man remained necessarily as a prisoner under the very muzzles of the riflemen in the donga .
page 284:
- There were trenches for us men, but no place of safety for our horses nearer than this long and narrow donga which ran from within our lines towards those of the Boers.
- Thousands of miserable cattle and goats roamed everywhere making tracks that would someday form cracks which successive rains would open into gullies and dongas .
References
* Jean Bradford, A Dictionary of South African English , Oxford (1978).Anagrams
* * English terms with multiple etymologiesnull
English
Noun
(en noun)- (Francis Bacon)
- Since no date of birth was entered for the patient, his age is null .
Adjective
(en adjective)- In proportion as we descend the social scale our snobbishness fastens on to mere nothings which are perhaps no more null than the distinctions observed by the aristocracy, but, being more obscure, more peculiar to the individual, take us more by surprise.