Joan
name, noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A placeholder or conventional name for any woman, particularly a younger lower-class woman. archaic, colloquial, obsolete
"Ber. O and I forsoth in loue, I that haue been loues whip?... Well, I will loue, write, sigh, pray, shue, grone, Some men must loue my Ladie, and some Ione."
- 2 A kind of close-fitting cap for women popular in the mid-18th century. archaic, obsolete
"A grocer's wife attractd our eyes by a new-fashioned cap called a Joan."
- 1 Alternative form of jone. alt-of, alternative
- 1 A female given name from French, a feminine form of John.
"Maybe my mother didn't name me after Joan Crawford after all, I thought; she just told me that to cover up. She named me after Joan of Arc, didn't she know what happened to women like that?"
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"Joan of Arc refused to renounce her belief that the voice she heard was from God and none other."
Etymology
A clipped or hypochoristic form of Joanna, from Latin Joanna, from Koine Greek Ἰωάννα (Iōánna), from Hebrew יוֹחָנָה (Yôḥānāh, literally “God is gracious”), the feminized form of יְהוֹחָנָן (Yəhōḥānān) which produced John and its many doublets. As a placeholder name, cf. similar use of John and Jack. Doublet of Ivana, Jana, Jane, Janice, Janis, Jean, Jeanne, Jen, Joanna, Joanne, Johanna, Juana, Shavonne, Sian, Siobhan, Shane, Shaun, Shauna, and Sheena.
Related phrases
More for "joan"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.