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Joshua

proper nounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈd͡ʒɑʃ(j)u.ə//
  • //ˈd͡ʒɒʃ(j)ʊə//

The sixth book of the Old Testament of the Bible, and a book of the Tanakh.

proper noun

  1. 1

    The sixth book of the Old Testament of the Bible, and a book of the Tanakh.

  2. 2

    The son of Nun, Judge of Israel following Moses; author of the Book of Joshua; Quranic figure.

    So Joshua took the whole land, according to all that the Lord said unto Moses; and Joshua gave it for an inheritance unto Israel according to their divisions by their tribes. And the land rested from war.

  3. 3

    A male given name from Hebrew.

    The shooter believed to be responsible for the incident was identified as Joshua Jahn, according to three sources familiar with the case.

  4. 4

    A surname, transferred from the given name

    Anthony Joshua

    Dakota Joshua

  5. 5

    A city in Johnson County, Texas, United States, named after the biblical Joshua.

Etymology

From Biblical Hebrew יְהוֹשֻׁעַ (Yehoshúa'), perhaps from הוֹשֵׁעַ (Hoshéa') with addition of יהוה (YHWH, “Yahweh”), thus meaning "Yahweh is salvation". See הוֹשִׁיעַ (hoshía', “to save”). By cognate a direct equivalent to Jesus via Latin Iēsūs and Ancient Greek Ἰησοῦς (Iēsoûs) from Aramaic יֵשׁוּע (Yēšū́ʿ), akin to Hebrew יֵשׁוּעַ (Yeshúa'), a variant of Yehoshúa'. The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament consistently render the two Hebrew names Yehoshúa' (whence Joshua) and Yeshúa' (whence Jeshua) into Koine Greek as Iēsoûs (whence Jesus).

noun

  1. 1

    A Joshua tree.

    Isolated Joshua trees appear at 75.1 m. among the mesquite and sage, increasing rapidly in number until they form a forest on both sides. […] The age of the Joshuas is popularly compared to that of the Sequoias.

Forms

plural
Joshuas
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).