It's even more popular to do it with a "y" (football =>footy, present => prezzie, tantrum => tanty)
In this case it gets confusing because we call a gas/petrol station a "service station" which of course inevitably became the servo, I guess because servy sounded a bit too weird, even for us.
The online version of the most popular Australian dictionary, the Macquarie, is behind a login but my hardcopy version doesn't list servo anyway (although it does list other Oz colloquialisms like bludger). You can find references to it in the Collins[1] and also slang sites like KoalaNet[2]
It's just a general Australian thing of abbreviating anything with too many syllables by chopping as much as possible off the end and adding an "o"
Smoke break => smoko, Bottle shop => Bottle-o, garbage man => garbo
It's even more popular to do it with a "y" (football =>footy, present => prezzie, tantrum => tanty)
In this case it gets confusing because we call a gas/petrol station a "service station" which of course inevitably became the servo, I guess because servy sounded a bit too weird, even for us.
The online version of the most popular Australian dictionary, the Macquarie, is behind a login but my hardcopy version doesn't list servo anyway (although it does list other Oz colloquialisms like bludger). You can find references to it in the Collins[1] and also slang sites like KoalaNet[2]
[1] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/servo [2] http://www.koalanet.com.au/australian-slang.html