agunah

agunah noun: a Jewish woman who is trapped in a marriage, either because her husband has disappeared or because he will not grant her a gett.

Noun

agunah (plural agunahs or agunot or agunoth)

A Jewish woman who is trapped in a marriage, either because her husband has disappeared or because he will not grant her a gett.
- A woman may become an agunah either through her husband's accidental disappearance or through his willful desertion, although accidental disappearance constitutes the main source of difficulty.1986, Menachem M. Brayer, The Jewish Woman in Rabbinic Literature, page 187
- Widows, among them agunos, chose the Holy City as a way of expressing their eternal love for God.1998, Dovid Rossoff, Where Heaven Touches Earth, page xii

The problem of the agunah, the woman (or man) who is chained to a marriage and unable to free herself from this marriage, is not a new one.2001, Michael J. Broyde, Marriage, Divorce, and the Abandoned Wife in Jewish Law:
Our Master could see the agony of his little relative who was not yet fifteen and was already an agunah.2014, S. Y. Agnon, The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella, pages 10–11:

Borrowed from Hebrew עגונה (“chained woman”).

What does agunah mean?: Agunah means a Jewish woman who is trapped in a marriage, either because her husband has disappeared or because he will not grant her a gett.
How do you use agunah in a sentence?: The problem of the agunah, the woman (or man) who is chained to a marriage and unable to free herself from this marriage, is not a new one.
What part of speech is agunah?: Agunah is a noun.
What is the plural of agunah?: The plural of agunah is agunahs.

Adapted from Wiktionary: agunah (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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