Juneteenth

//ˌd͡ʒuːnˈtiːnθ// name

name ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Proper Noun
  1. 1
    Also more fully as Juneteenth Day: the United States national holiday commemorating the end of slavery, observed on June 19. US, countable, uncountable

    "There was^([sic – meaning were]) not so many colored people in the city as usual on Saturday evening, all of them, very near, being out at the "Juneteenth siliibration.""

  2. 2
    Alternative letter-case form of Juneteenth. alt-of, countable, uncountable

Example

More examples

"There was^([sic – meaning were]) not so many colored people in the city as usual on Saturday evening, all of them, very near, being out at the "Juneteenth siliibration.""

Etymology

Blend of June + nineteenth, commemorating the anniversary of June 19, 1865, when Union Army General Gordon Granger (1821–1876) issued General Order No. 3 in Galveston, Texas, to enforce President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. The General Order stated that all previously enslaved people in Texas were now free. The word entered wider usage after becoming a federal holiday in 2021.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.