Jubilee
Pronunciation
- UK IPA: /dÊ’uËbɪˈliË/
Alternative forms
- jubile 16th-18th c.
Origin
From Middle French jubile (French jubilé), from Late Latin jūbilaeus. Beyond this point, the etymology is disputed. Traditionally this derives from Ancient Greek ἰωβηλαῖος ("of a jubilee"), from ἰώβηλος ("jubilee"), from Hebrew יובל (yobēl/yovēl, "ram, ram's horn; jubilee"), presumably because a ram’s horn trumpet was originally used to proclaim the event.
Peake's commentary on the Bible
More recent scholarship disputes this – while the religious sense is certainly from Hebrew, the term itself is proposed to have Proto-Indo-European roots. Specifically, this interpretation proposed that Latin jÅ«bilaeus is from iÅ«bilÅ ("I shout for joy"), which predates the Vulgate, and that this verb, as well as Middle Irish ilach ("victory cry"), English yowl, and Ancient Greek á¼°Ïζω ("shout"), derived from Proto-Indo-European *yu- ("shout for joy"). In this interpretation, the Hebrew term is instead a borrowing from an Indo-European language, hence ultimately of Proto-Indo-European origin.
J. P. Mallory and (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19929668-2, p. 363.
Full definition of jubilee
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.
- 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.