Hobson-jobson
noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 Any Indian religious observance, especially the Muharram. countable, obsolete, slang, uncountable
"‘You must be moped to death in this dull place; and next week is Hobson Jobson. Can’t you throw some dust any how, in the eyes of the cat, and meet me and Philip somewhere, and so get away to the Tamacha.’"
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of Hobson-Jobson. alt-of, countable, uncountable
- 3 The assimilation of borrowed lexis, either partial or whole, to word forms of the borrowing language. uncountable
"Falaun, s. […] gradually, by a process of Hobson-Jobson, this was turned into Forlorn."
- 4 A word or phrase borrowed by one language from another and modified in pronunciation to fit the set of sounds the borrowing language typically uses. countable
"CARAFT, here is a delicious Hobson-Jobson from that veritable well of curious Anglo-Indianisms, the Madras Manual of Administration[.]"
Example
More examples"‘You must be moped to death in this dull place; and next week is Hobson Jobson. Can’t you throw some dust any how, in the eyes of the cat, and meet me and Philip somewhere, and so get away to the Tamacha.’"
Etymology
Derived from adapting the call Hassan! Hussein! (حَسَن حُسَيْن (ḥasan ḥusayn), a lament for the grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad) to Hobson and Jobson, a pair of comic figures popular in the nineteenth century. Note that the conventional derivation from "Ya Hassan! Ya Hussein!" is incorrect. Coined in the linguistic sense by Yule and Burnell in their dictionary Hobson-Jobson.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.