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Joe

proper nounnountop 1 000 in film dialogue

  • United Kingdom//d͡ʒəʊ//
  • United States//d͡ʒoʊ//

A diminutive of the male given names Joseph, Josiah, Joel, or Josias.

proper noun

  1. 1

    A diminutive of the male given names Joseph, Josiah, Joel, or Josias.

    "With a name like Joe," Joe always said, "I had to open a bar and grill, just so I could put up a sign saying 'Joe's Bar and Grill'."

    With Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ decision to end his campaign on Wednesday, it’s now official: Former Vice President Joe Biden will be the Democratic presidential nominee this fall.

  2. 2

    A surname.

  3. 3

    Variant of JorareAlternative form of Jo: a diminutive of various female given names.

Etymology

Etymology tree Biblical Hebrew הוֹסִיף (hosíf)der. Biblical Hebrew יוֹסֵףbor. Middle English Ioseph English Josephclip. English Joelclip. English Josiahclip. English Josiasclip. English Joe Short form (diminutive form) of various names beginning with Jo..., particularly the male names Joseph and, less often, Joel, Josiah and Josias. The spelling Jo is used more often for diminutives of similar female names.

noun

  1. 1

    informalA male; a guy; a fellow.

    I'm just an ordinary Joe.

  2. 2

    archaicSynonym of Joe Miller (“an old joke”).

    O what "a Joe," — what an "old Joe!" — / A very "old Joe!" — / Old Joe Miller made the joke before, / But nothing tells better that ^([sic]) a good old Joe!

Forms

plural
Joes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).