Jubilee

How to spell jubilee

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce jubilee

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does jubilee mean?

1. nounA special anniversary of an event, or the celebrations marking it, often a fiftieth or other major milestone.

Jubilee in a sentence

• The town planned a street party to mark the queen's diamond jubilee.

• The company held a silver jubilee dinner for its twenty-fifth year in business.

Where does jubilee come from?

Language of origin: Hebrew

The word traces back to the Hebrew yobel, which meant a ram's horn or the trumpet blast made by blowing through one. In the law of ancient Israel, that horn was sounded to announce a special year every fifty years, when debts were cancelled, slaves were freed, and land returned to its original owners, so yobel came to name that whole year of release. The term passed into Greek and then into the Latin of the church as jubilaeus, which the Christian tradition adopted for a holy year of pardon proclaimed by the Pope. Along the way the Latin spelling was coloured by the unrelated Latin verb jubilare, meaning to shout for joy, which is why the modern word carries such a celebratory ring. English took it from Old French jubile in the late 1300s, and the cheerful sense of a grand anniversary, especially a royal one, grew strong in later centuries. That hidden double i, jub-i-lee, is the spot writers tend to slip on, and it survives straight from the original yobel.

How the word is built

• jubil- (from Hebrew yobel: ram's horn)
• -ee (noun ending shaped by French and Latin)