Word.ws English Dictionary

hoon

UK/huːn/US/hun/

hoon noun: a worthless person; a hooligan or lout.

Noun (1)

hoon (plural hoons)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand, derogatory, slang) A worthless person; a hooligan or lout.
    • 'You flash hoon,' he went on, 'Kiddin' you're white, eh?[…].'1938, Xavier Herbert, Capricornia: A Novel, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, →OCLC
  2. (Australia, dated, slang) A pimp.
    • When the girls were sick, the hoons would beat the shit out of them and put them back on the street.2009, Adam Shand, The Skull: Informers, Hit Men and Australia's Toughest Cop, Melbourne: Black Inc., ISBN 978-1-86395-438-9; republished Melbourne, Black Inc., 2010, ISBN 978-1-86395-482-2, page 85
  3. (Australia, New Zealand, slang) A person who drives excessively quickly, loudly or irresponsibly; a street drag racer often driving heavily customized cars.
    • Police have impounded an average of 10 cars a day since hoon laws were introduced by the State Government in June 2006. Hoon related offences include burnouts, doughnuts, drag racing, repeated driving while disqualified and high-level speeding. Offences are detailed in section 84C of the Road...2008 July 30, “Hoon Laws”, in Victoria Police, archived from the original on 15 May 2009
    • The hoons piled out of the wreck brimming with righteous road rage, and were settling to the task of beating the shit out of Wozza, Mutton and the hapless wheelman when they discovered the plastic bag.2009, Damien Broderick, Rory Barnes, I'm Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners, New York, N.Y.: Point Blank, →ISBN, page 29
  4. (Australia, New Zealand, slang) An attempt or go at something.
    • The stars of Happytime Murders give Kiwi slang a hoon2018 August 28, “stars give kiwi slang a hoon”, in The Rock (radio station)
    • Havin' a hoon on TVNZ's new OnDemand platform2015 February 13, “TVNZ OnDemand platform”, in TVNZ Ondemand

Verb (1)

hoon (third-person singular simple present hoons, present participle hooning, simple past and past participle hooned)

  1. (Australia, New Zealand, especially) To drive excessively quickly, loudly or irresponsibly.
    • […] you've hooned off – it's fair to say hooned off – at quite a high speed.2003, Western Australian Reports: Authorized Law Reports of the Supreme Court of Western Australia, volume 28, Sydney: Published for the Council of Law Reporting of Western Australia by Butterworths...
    • Cruising, hooning and street machining all involve the social use of public space where young people can exert agency by independently engaging with their surroundings. Young people use public space to meet their needs, and not always in the way a specific space was designed for. One example is...2012, Rob White, “The Making, Shaking and Taking of Public Spaces”, in Carol Jones, Elaine Barclay, Rob [I.] Mawby, editors, The Problem of Pleasure: Leisure, Tourism and Crime, Abingdon, Oxon; New...
    Synonyms:
    hoon it

Verb (2)

hoon (third-person singular simple present hoons, present participle hooning, simple past and past participle hooned)

  1. To make a hooting or howling sound.
    • All this time, every night, and sometimes most of each night, the hooning whistling of the Room was intolerable. It was as if an intelligence there knew that steps were being taken against it, and piped and hooned in a sort of mad, mocking contempt.1910, William Hope Hodgson, “The Whistling Room”, in The Idler: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine, London: Chatto & Windus, OCLC 34617117, page 606; republished in Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, London...
    • Black flashing storms, the lowings and bellowings of the old sanded forest, the whistling and hooning of nameless birds, the lonesome moons, the weird fifteen-foot stone dwellers of the Old Priory, soft grassy slopes on which lovers lay, […]1966, Christina Stead, Dark Places of the Heart, New York, N.Y.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, →OCLC, page 278

Noun (2)

hoon (plural hoons)

  1. (historical) A unit of weight (about 0.378125 of a gram, or 0.0133 of an ounce) used to measure opium in British-controlled parts of Asia; a candareen.
    • This abovementioned Chandoo or prepared opium for smoking is retailed by them [the East India Company] at 5 pice per hoon, equal to 8000 Spanish dollars per chest, and on the opposite or Queda shore the hoon is sold at 6 pice or 9,600 dollars, […]1838, N[athaniel] Wallich, “XVII.—A Few Brief Notices on the State of the Population of Prince of Wales' Island, and of the Price at which Opium is Retailed in that Colony”, in Transactions of the...
    • Visited in company with the agent of the Opium farmer 4 Opium shops, found them filled with Chinese except one which had in addition 7 Malays and natives of India. Amongst these were 3 tailors; one woman 30 years old, was there smoking her pipe,—she had been in the habit of doing so for 3 years at...1848 January, R. Little, “On the Habitual Use of Opium in Singapore”, in J[ames] R[ichardson] Logan, editor, The Journal of the Indian Archipelago and Eastern Asia, volume II, number I, Singapore...

Noun (3)

hoon (plural hoons)

  1. (India, historical) A pagoda, a type of gold coin.
    • The plaintiff in his plaint states, that the first and second defendants' elder brother, Soobbiya Shetty, on the 8th Ashweeja Bahoola of the year Veya, mortgaged to him, for 2½ hoons, his two slaves, viz. a female Dher, named Honnoo, and a male Pardeshey, together with their offspring, and made...1835 July 29, “Decree Passed by the Barcoor Moonsif, in Original Cause, No. 126 of 1835, on the 29th July 1835: Hossamunay Manddawanna Shetty, residing in the Hondady Village, and Brumawhar Mogany...

Proper noun capitalized: Hoon

Hoon (countable and uncountable, plural Hoons)

  1. A surname from Dutch.
  2. A civil parish (without a council) in South Derbyshire district, Derbyshire, England (OS grid ref SK2231).

hoon meaning in Tamil, Urdu, Telugu and Malayalam

hoon in Tamil

ஹூன் செய்ய

hoon in Urdu

حون

hoon in Telugu

హూన్

hoon in Malayalam

ഹൂൺ, ഹൂൻ
More languagesFewer languages
hoon in Kannada
ಹೂನ್
hoon in Odia
ହୁନ୍

Examples of hoon in a sentence

  • Police have impounded an average of 10 cars a day since hoon laws were introduced by the State Government in June 2006.2008 July 30, “Hoon Laws”, in Victoria Police, archived from the original on 15 May 2009:
  • Cruising, hooning and street machining all involve the social use of public space where young people can exert agency by independently engaging with their surroundings.2012, Rob White, “The Making, Shaking and Taking of Public Spaces”, in Carol Jones, Elaine Barclay, Rob [I.] Mawby, editors, The Problem of...
  • Zeven let loose a hooning howl of approval.2012, Traci Harding, The Light-Field (Triad of Being; book 3), Sydney: HarperCollins, →ISBN:
  • Their average consumption was six hoons.1860, A chaplain in H. M. Indian Service [pseudonym; James Aberigh Mackay], “An Explanation of the Peiho Massacre”, in From London to...

Synonyms of hoon

Forms of hoon

Noun
pluralhoons
alternative formhon
alternative formhun
Verb
third-person singular presenthoons
present participlehooning
past participlehooned
pasthooned
Proper noun
pluralHoons

Origin of hoon

Uncertain; used initially as a general term of abuse. It first appeared in print in Capricornia (1938) by Australian writer Xavier Herbert (1901–1984); in a 1941 letter Herbert stated he had heard the term in his youth.

Unknown; perhaps imitative.

Borrowed from Hokkien 分 (hun). Doublet of fen and fan.

Words formed from hoon

Phrases with hoon

Words that rhyme with hoon

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about hoon

What does hoon mean?
Hoon means a worthless person; a hooligan or lout.
What is hoon in Tamil?
Hoon in Tamil is ஹூன் செய்ய. See Hoon meaning in Tamil.
How do you use hoon in a sentence?
Police have impounded an average of 10 cars a day since hoon laws were introduced by the State Government in June 2006.
What part of speech is hoon?
Hoon can be a noun, a verb or a proper noun.
How do you pronounce hoon?
Hoon is pronounced /huːn/ (UK).
What is the plural of hoon?
The plural of hoon is hoons.

Words near hoon in the dictionary

  1. hooman
  2. hoomans
  3. hoomei
  4. Hoomi
  5. hoomie
  6. hoon
  7. hoon it
  8. Hoonan
  9. hoond
  10. hoondee
  11. hoondees

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hoon (page history and authors); Hoon (page history and authors); hoon (Tamil, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hoon (Urdu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hoon (Telugu, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hoon (Malayalam, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hoon (Kannada, IndicTrans2 machine translation) (model and license); hoon (Odia, 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.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 hoon.ogg.

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