Job

How to spell job

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce job

What does job mean?

1. nounA paid position of regular employment, or a specific task to be done.

Job in a sentence

• She started her new job at the bank on Monday.

• Painting the fence was a quick job that took an afternoon.

Where does job come from?

Language of origin: Unknown

The origins of 'job' are genuinely murky, which makes it a favourite puzzle for word historians. It first appears in English in the early 1600s, often in the phrase 'jobbe of worke', meaning a single discrete piece or lump of work undertaken for payment. Many scholars connect it to the older English 'gobbe' or 'gob', meaning a lump or mouthful, so a 'job' was literally a chunk of work bitten off at a time. From that humble sense of a one-off task it broadened to mean regular paid employment, and later picked up the slang sense of a planned crime or 'heist'. Because no clean foreign ancestor can be pinned down with certainty, its derivation remains officially uncertain, though the link to 'gob' is the most widely accepted explanation.

How the word is built

• job (a single piece of work; root origin obscure)