jubilee

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[edit] English

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[edit] Alternative forms

[edit] Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA: /dʒuːbɪˈliː/

[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)

  1. (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.
  2. A fiftieth anniversary. [from 14th c.]
  3. (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.]
  4. A time of celebration or rejoicing. [from 16th c.]
  5. (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.

[edit] Derived terms

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