Word.ws English Dictionary

goon

Syllables: go·on/ˈɡuːn/UK/ˈɡəʊˌɒn/

goon noun: a thug; a usually muscular henchman with little intelligence.

Noun (1)

goon (countable and uncountable, plural goons)

  1. A thug; a usually muscular henchman with little intelligence.
    • Efforts to unionize were routinely met with clubbings, shootings, jailings, blacklistings and executions, perpetrated not only by well-armed legions of company goons, but also by police officers, deputies, National Guardsmen and even regular soldiers.2009 February 22, Kevin Baker, “Blood on the Street”, in New York Times
  2. (US, informal) A hired and paid person who is assigned to terrorize and kill opponents.
  3. A fool; someone who is silly, stupid, awkward, or outlandish.
    • Mr. Campion appeared suitably impressed and she warmed to him. He was very easy to talk to with those long clown lines in his pale face, a natural goon, born rather too early she suspected.1963, Margery Allingham, chapter 5, in The China Governess: A Mystery, London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC
    • Sending for the goon who sent for me / He's thinking he's hard, yeah, it's Little T2016 May 5, “Thinking He's Hard (Little T Reply)”, performed by Soph Aspin
  4. (derogatory) An enforcer or fighter.
    • […]a scout from the Flames came down from Saskatoon, said, "There's always room on our team for a goon"2002, “Hit Somebody!”, performed by Warren Zevon
  5. (UK, World War II, PoW slang) A German guard in a prisoner-of-war camp.
  6. (slang) One hired to legally kidnap a child and forcibly transport them to a boot camp, boarding school, wilderness therapy, or a similar rehabilitation facility.
    • Owen Jenney, Ms. Hamburger's son, got gooned, though he said his goons turned out to be "really nice guys, actually." He is 19 now, a freshman in college, and he remembers arriving in the wilderness frightened and confused, angrily convinced that sending him across the country to Oregon was "way...2016 October 20, Laura Collins-Hughes, “Therapy Becomes Theater in 'Wilderness'”, in New York Times
  7. (Australia, colloquial, uncountable) Box wine.
    • Once a tap was designed in the 1970s goon climbed quickly to make up about 50 per cent of wine sales in Australia. In the days when restaurants sold "house wine", goon was known for being economical above anything else, and convenient, associated more with families on a budget and people on low...2021 December 22, Adele Wessell, ABC News
  8. (Internet) A member of the comedy website Something Awful.
    • These first two steps were time-sensitive. Not only did goons need to beat Imgur's mid-May deadline but they also needed to account for the possibility that Imgur would treat the download as some kind of attack and throttle it — a possibility that, it turns out, never came to pass.2023 May 8, Adi Robertson, “Something Awful is racing to save the best and worst of web history”, in The Verge, archived from the original on 12 Aug 2023

Verb (1)

goon (third-person singular simple present goons, present participle gooning, simple past and past participle gooned)

  1. (slang, transitive) To act like a goon; to act in an intimidating or aggressive way towards opponents.
    • In the mid-week game against the Czech republic, the Czech team speared, slashed, tripped, gooned, and in more cases than I recall, crosschecked Canadian players in the teeth.1997 May 14, Gary Gambino Sr., “sports bytes 19 pt. 1”, in rec.sport.baseball (Usenet)
    • Imagine losing to a team that gooned it up and attempted to take out your best players with heavy hits?2019 June 13, Dan Shaughnessy, “What experts are saying about the Bruins' Stanley Cup loss”, in The Boston Globe, archived from the original on 22 Dec 2022
  2. (neologism) To legally kidnap a child and forcibly transport them to a boot camp, boarding school, wilderness therapy, or a similar rehabilitation facility.
    • Owen Jenney, Ms. Hamburger's son, got gooned, though he said his goons turned out to be "really nice guys, actually." He is 19 now, a freshman in college, and he remembers arriving in the wilderness frightened and confused, angrily convinced that sending him across the country to Oregon was "way...2016 October 20, Laura Collins-Hughes, “Therapy Becomes Theater in 'Wilderness'”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 23 Oct...
    • Some described being "gooned" in the middle of the night by strongmen hired by their family to forcibly transport them to camp.2022 November 14, Nicolle Okoren, “The wilderness 'therapy' that teens say feels like abuse: 'You are on guard at all times'”, in Katharine Viner, editor, The Guardian, London: Guardian News & Media...

Verb (2)

goon (third-person singular simple present goons, present participle gooning, simple past and past participle gooned)

  1. (Internet, intransitive, slang, strictly) To masturbate for long periods of time without reaching a climax.
    • Dirt bike riding is the pursuit of skill and technique in a challenging environment. To me, its not about gooning before friends to be the baddest one on the block. Leave that for other stuff.1998 August 11, docto...@msn.com, “Fellow Riders/Racers... Sanity Check!”, in rec.motorcycles.dirt (Usenet)
    • Surfing meaning to surf decently most normal surfspots in the world, no gooning out.2006 June 28, LeeD, “Re: Advice for windsurfing articles”, in rec.windsurfing (Usenet)
    1. (Internet, broadly, intransitive, strictly) To masturbate (in general).

Noun (2)

goon (countable and uncountable, plural goons)

  1. (Australia, Internet, countable, informal, intransitive) A wine flagon or cask.
    • We drank goons of cheap wine.2009, Stephen Cummings, Will It Be Funny Tomorrow, Billy?: Misadventures in Music, page 11
  2. (Australia, Internet, informal, intransitive, uncountable) Cheap or inferior cask wine.
    • ‘On the night of our school graduation he stole a flagon of goon wine and disappeared into the woods. The police found him the next day asleep on the creek.[…]’2010, Patrick Holland, The Mary Smokes Boys, page 128
    • With these instructions, we take turns sipping the wine directly from the bottle on the beach. It′s not the classiest thing to do but the fact that it′s in a bottle already makes it classier than all the boxes of goon we′ve consumed this trip.2010, Jason Leung, This All Encompassing Trip: Chasing Pearl Jam Around the World, page 384

Noun (3)

goon (uncountable)

  1. (Internet, intransitive) A Sino-Japanese kanji pronunciation layer, considered the first Sino-Japanese kanji reading type used in Japan.
    • The Buddhist term 権化 is read as gonge, using the kanji's goon readings.

Proper noun capitalized: Goon

Goon (plural Goons)

  1. A surname.

Noun (4) capitalized: Goon

Goon (plural Goons)

  1. Alternative letter-case form of goon (“a member of the comedy web site Something Awful”).
    • The 90,000 registered forum users can pretty much depend on an instant Goon fraternity in almost whatever game they’re interested in. Thanks to a history of gaming exploits and the general scatologically angled humor of Something Awful, the Goons have a reputation as being a disruptive influence in...2008, Jim Rossignol, “[Reykjavik] Model Living”, in This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities, Ann Arbor, Mich.: The University of Michigan Press, →ISBN, page 177
    • Not all the message boards celebrate the griefers in their midst: Kyanka finds griefing lame, as do many Goons and /b/tards. Nor do the griefers themselves all get along. Patriotic Nigras, /b/tards all, look on the somewhat better-behaved Goon community—in particular the W-Hats, a Second Life group...2008 January 18, Julian Dibbell, “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses: Put the Blame on Griefers, the Sociopaths of the Virtual World”, in Steven Johnson, editor, The Best Technology Writing 2009...

goon meaning in Hindi, Marathi, Urdu and Malayalam

goon in Hindi

गुंडो

goon in Marathi

गुंड

goon in Urdu

گون

goon in Malayalam

ഗൂൺ
More languagesFewer languages
goon in Kannada
ಗೂಂಡೆ
goon in Gujarati
ગુંડો

Examples of goon in a sentence

  • Once a tap was designed in the 1970s goon climbed quickly to make up about 50 per cent of wine sales in Australia.2021 December 22, Adele Wessell, ABC News:
  • They gooned us, really, and we just had to respond.2022 June 24, David Fleming, quoting Mike Ricci, “Fight Night at the Joe: Remembering the legendary Colorado Avalanche-Detroit Red Wings...
  • He was being "gooned" - forcibly transported to a place aimed at correcting naughty children's behaviour.2022 October 9, Rozina Sabur, “Troubled US teenagers 'snatched' at their parents' request”, in Chris Evans, editor, The Daily Telegraph...
  • The 23-year-old posted some photos on Instagram on Saturday of himself gooning around for the camera.2015 December 27, “Dennis Quaid's son Jack posts hilarious photo posing with his dad and siblings pulling faces on Christmas Day”, in Daily...

All 34 example sentences with goon

Synonyms of goon

29 more synonymsFewer synonyms

All synonyms of goon

Forms of goon

Noun
pluralgoons
alternative formgo'on
alternative formgo-on
pluralGoons
Verb
third-person singular presentgoons
present participlegooning
past participlegooned
pastgooned
Proper noun
pluralGoons

Plural of goon: goons

Origin of goon

Shortened from gooney, from obsolete gony (“simpleton”), used circa 1580, of unknown origin. Perhaps a familiar term derived from Middle English gone, a variant of gome (“man, person”). Gony was applied by sailors to the albatross and similar big, clumsy birds (circa 1839). The term goon first carried the meaning "stupid person" (circa 1921). Compare Scots goni, guni (“a bogey, bugbear, hobgoblin”), dialectal Swedish gonnar (“elves, goblins”, plural). * Etymology 1, noun sense 1 ("hired thug"; circa 1938) is largely influenced by the comic strip character Alice the Goon from the Popeye series. * Etymology 1, noun sense 3 ("fool") was reinforced by the popular radio program, The Goon Show, starring Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers. * Etymology 1, noun sense 5 ("guard") was influenced by both etymology 1, noun sense 1 and etymology 1, noun sense 3, though not by The Goon Show reference, which arose about 10 years after WWII.

Possibly derived from etymology 1, from etymology 1, noun sense 3 ("a fool; a stupid person"), or from etymology 1, noun sense 1 ("a thug").

Perhaps diminutive slang for flagon or from Aboriginal English goom.

Words formed from goon

Phrases with goon

Words that rhyme with goon

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about goon

What does goon mean?
Goon means a thug; a usually muscular henchman with little intelligence.
What is goon in Hindi?
Goon in Hindi is गुंडो. See Goon meaning in Hindi.
How do you use goon in a sentence?
Once a tap was designed in the 1970s goon climbed quickly to make up about 50 per cent of wine sales in Australia.
What part of speech is goon?
Goon can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce goon?
Goon is pronounced /ˈɡuːn/.
What is the plural of goon?
The plural of goon is goons.

Words near goon in the dictionary

  1. goomer
  2. goomers
  3. gooms
  4. Goomtee
  5. Goomti
  6. goon
  7. goon baiting
  8. goon cave
  9. goon caves
  10. Goon Nure
  11. goon out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: goon (page history and authors); Goon (page history and authors); goon (Hindi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); goon (Marathi, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); goon (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); goon (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); goon (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); goon (Gujarati, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license). 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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-goon.wav, EN-AU ck1 goon.ogg.

Cite this entry: “goon.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/goon. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.