English · Idiom Candidate

bush telegraph

Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.

Both English Tiếng Việt

Meaning · English

An informal network of people sharing information and gossip

Nghĩa · Tiếng Việt

mạng lưới thông tin không chính thức

Machine-translated — suggest a fix

Literally: a telegraph in the bush

Where it’s used: Used Widespread English

Examples

improves communications by means of a ‘ bush telegraph’ system; and

Some of the poor made quite a good living from these services and one can imagine an efficient ‘ bush telegraph’ system to alert others of forthcoming requiems.

British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)

Sources & notes

Listed in Wiktionary’s “English idioms” category (retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.

Common questions

What does “bush telegraph” mean?

An informal network of people sharing information and gossip Literally: a telegraph in the bush

Is “bush telegraph” formal or informal?

No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.

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