Jonah
name, noun, slang ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 A person who brings a ship bad luck. slang
"Superstitious sailors regarded a clergyman as an unlucky shipmate, a Jonah whose presence would never be welcome."
- 2 a person believed to bring bad luck to those around them wordnet
- 3 Any person or object which is deemed to cause bad luck; a jinx. broadly, slang
"‘My first agent, and he's dead. It's incredible. I feel like a complete Jonah.’"
- 1 A male given name from Hebrew.
"'It's Jonah,' Ted says. Simmy considers this. 'As in the whale?' 'Yep.' 'You know,' Simmy says, 'that people are going to say that to him for ever more?' 'What? The whale thing?' 'Yes.' Ted shrugs again. 'Well. He'll get used to it. All names have got some associations. Anyway, he looks like a Jonah. And I like the name Jonah—' 'Obviously,' Simmy cuts in, 'since you chose it.'"
- 2 A minor prophet who was cast into the sea and swallowed by a great fish.
"So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea: and the sea ceased from her raging."
- 3 A book of the Old Testament and the Hebrew Tanakh.
- 4 The 10th sura (chapter) of the Qur'an.
Example
More examples"Jonah and Leah live in a beautiful, straw-bale, timber-framed home that they built from hand."
Etymology
From the Hebrew יוֹנָה (yônâh, “dove”). Doublet of Jonas.
Related phrases
More for "jonah"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.