English
jubilee
see also: Jubilee
Pronunciation
  • (British) IPA: /dʒuːbɪˈliː/
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 25th, 40th, 50th, 60th or 70th 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. An occasion of mass manumission from slavery.
    • 1865, Henry Clay Work, “Marching Through Georgia”:
      Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee!
      Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free!
    • 1890, Levi C. McKinstry, “Lincoln’s White Name” in A Poetic Offering to John Greenleaf Whittier, page 101:
      The chains of that great power we broke;
      The burdened captives were set free,
      For Lincoln held the pen, whose stroke
      Proclaimed, the year of jubilee.
  6. (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.
Translations Translations
  • Russian: юбиле́й
Jubilee
Noun

jubilee (plural jubilees)

  1. (Jewish law) a year of rest, observed by the Israelites every 50 years
  2. (in Roman Catholicism) a holy year when people are encouraged to make a pilgrimage to Rome
  3. The Jubilee Line of the London Underground (named after the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II).
Translations Translations

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