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Originally Posted by JamMak
I'm guessing Prisoner of Her Majesty. Ie, while we were deporting all our cons to aussie land they were all POHM's / poms.
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That is one of the popular (although wrong) supposed origins of the word.
It is in fact pom - which is a shortening of pomegranate, which was rhyming slang for immigrant. The term became popular in the post-war immigration boom of the late 40’s early 50’s...and was mostly applied to british migrants as they made up the largest percentage of immigrants at the time. The term later became commonly used to refer to people of brittish origin.