schoolie

• schooly

From school +‎ -ie (“diminutive suffix”).

• Audio (General Australian):

  (file)

• Rhymes: -uːli

schoolie (plural schoolies)

1. (Australia) A senior school student, especially a school-leaver, engaged in unsupervised celebrations during schoolies week.
   • 1996, John Cotterell, Social Networks and Social Influences in Adolescence, page 176:

     Known as the Drug Awareness Network, it was able to find funding assistance for its work from the National Drug Education unit. The network devised a programme of activities which was later advertised to intending Schoolies by helpers walking the streets and distributing leafets containing information about forthcoming events.

   • 2007, John Chalmers, Byron Bay Taxis and Lunacies, page 78:

     Some of the locals prey on the Schoolies.

   • 2009, Justine Vaisutis, Australia, Lonely Planet, page 338:

     If staying in November or December, the place is filled with hundreds of schoolies.

   • 2010, Garry Disher, Blood Moon, page 17:

     But the victim in this case had been a schoolie, she′d been assaulted during Schoolies Week, and her attacker might have been a fellow schoolie.

2. (Australia) A schoolteacher.
3. (UK, military) An education officer.
   • 2008, John H. Dunning, Seasons of a Scholar: Some Personal Reflections of an International Business Economist, page 46:

     Arbroath, being a training station for young naval airmen, also housed several ‘schoolies’ (education officers), four of whom lived in an adjacent building to mine. I quickly struck up a close friendship with two of the schoolies, Ron Horner and Vivian Price.

4. (US, fishing) A juvenile gamefish (especially striped bass) at a stage where it tends to swim with others in schools rather than stay to itself.
   • 1997 August, Lawrence Pine, Massachusetts′s Plymouth Rock Bass, Field & Stream, page 94,

     Poppers and Clouser-style flies can produce large numbers of schoolies that average 16 to 24 inches, with a sprinkling of fish from 24 to 28 inches.

   • 2003, Larry Larsen, Amazon Peacock Bass Fishing: Top Tactics for Top Locations, page 150:

     Oklahomans Jim Campbell and Gary Tyler caught 123 peacocks (including two teeners) by concentrating on the schoolies with jigs and other small lures that day.

   • 2009, Tom Rosenbauer, Nick Lyons, The Orvis Guide to Beginning Fly Fishing: 101 Tips for the Absolute Beginner, page 88:

     Schoolies tend to concentrate inside harbors and along beaches, often moving far inside tidal creeks and salt ponds.

5. (equestrianism, informal) Synonym of school horse

• (senior school student attending school-leaving celebrations): leaver (Western Australia)
• (schoolteacher):
• (education officer):
• (bass that swims in a school): schoolie bass

• schoolies week

• toolie