jubilee
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
See also Jubilee
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[edit] English
[edit] Alternative forms
- jubile [16th-18th c.]
[edit] Pronunciation
[edit] Etymology
From Middle French jubile (French jubilé), from Late Latin jūbilaeus, from Ancient Greek ἰωβηλαῖος (“of a jubilee”), from ἰώβηλος (“jubilee”), from Hebrew יובל (yobēl/yovēl, “ram, ram's horn; jubilee”), probably because a ram's horn trumpet was originally used to proclaim the event.
[edit] Noun
jubilee (plural jubilees)
- (Jewish history) A special year of emancipation supposed to be kept every fifty years, when farming was abandoned and Hebrew slaves were set free. [from 14th c.]
- 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin 2010, p. 120:
- in the old Israel, there had supposedly been a system of ‘Jubilee’, a year in which all land should go back to the family to which it had originally belonged and during which all slaves should be released.
- 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Penguin 2010, p. 120:
- A fiftieth anniversary. [from 14th c.]
- (Catholicism) A special year (originally held every hundred years, then fifty, and then fewer) in which remission from sin could be granted as well as indulgences upon making a pilgrimage to Rome. [from 15th c.]
- A time of celebration or rejoicing. [from 16th c.]
- (obsolete) A period of fifty years; a half-century. [17th-18th c.]
- 1646, Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I.5:
- How their faiths could decline so low, as to concede [...] that the felicity of their Paradise should consist in a Jubile of copulation, that is, a coition of one act prolonged unto fifty years.
- 1646, Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, I.5:
[edit] Derived terms
[edit] Translations
a special anniversary
