jukebox
pronunciation
How to pronounce jukebox in British English:
UK [ˈdʒu:kbɒks]
How to pronounce jukebox in American English:
US [ˈdʒukbɑks]
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- Noun:
- a cabinet containing an automatic record player; records are played by inserting a coin
Word Origin
- jukebox
- jukebox: [20] The jukebox – a coin-operated record-player – got its name from being played in jukes; and a juke (or juke-house, or jukejoint), in US Black English slang of the middle years of the 20th century, was a roadhouse providing food and drink, music for dancing, and usually the services of prostitutes. The word probably came from the adjective juke or joog, which meant ‘wicked’ or ‘disorderly’ in the Gullah language, a creolized English of South Carolina, Georgia and northern Florida; and that in turn may well have originated in some as yet unidentified West African language.
- jukebox (n.)
- 1937, jook organ, from jook joint "roadhouse" (1935), Black English slang, from juke, joog "wicked, disorderly," in Gullah (the creolized English of the coastlands of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida), probably from Wolof and Bambara dzug "unsavory." Said to have originated in central Florida (see "A Note on Juke," Florida Review, vol. VII, no. 3, spring 1938). The spelling with a -u- might represent a deliberate attempt to put distance between the word and its origins. For a long time the commercial juke trade resisted the name juke box and even tried to raise a big publicity fund to wage a national campaign against it, but "juke box" turned out to be the biggest advertising term that could ever have been invented for the commercial phonograph and spread to the ends of the world during the war as American soldiers went abroad but remembered the juke boxes back home. ["Billboard," Sept. 15, 1945]
Example
- 1. They ponder the selections in their table-top jukebox .
- 2. As a black poet in my country put it , when reproached by some fellow african-americans for not writing poems about the indignities of racism , " a writer is not a jukebox . "
- 3. The cafeteria had the best jukebox in malaysia .
- 4. Remember how great their jukebox was ?
- 5. They 're like a neighborhood jukebox .