Goon

How to spell goon

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce goon

What does goon mean?

1. nounA hired tough or bully employed to intimidate or use violence.
2. nounA silly, clumsy, or foolish person.

Goon in a sentence

• The gangster sent a goon to collect the unpaid debt.

• He felt like a complete goon after tripping over the cable on stage.

• A hulking goon guarded the warehouse door all night.

• Only a goon would leave the front door wide open in the rain.

Where does goon come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origin of goon is genuinely murky, which is why its history reads as much from popular culture as from older speech. The likeliest seed is the older English dialect word 'gony' or 'gawney', meaning a simpleton or a slow, dull person, which had drifted around since the 1500s. The modern sense crystallised in the 1920s and especially after 1933, when the American cartoonist E. C. Segar introduced a hulking, dim creature called Alice the Goon into his Popeye comic strip; readers seized on the name for any big, stupid, menacing figure. From there it shifted quickly into American labour disputes of the 1930s, where a 'goon' meant a hired thug brought in to intimidate strikers. Because the word is short, doubled-vowel slang rather than a learned borrowing, English never settled it on a tidy Latin or French root, and that is exactly why its etymology is best labelled uncertain.

How the word is built

• goon (single root, of uncertain origin; popularised by Alice the Goon, a comic-strip character)