Word.ws English Dictionary

jinja

jinja noun: a Shinto place of worship.

jinja: a Shinto place of worship
Image: N yotarou, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

jinja (plural jinjas or jinja)

  1. A Shinto place of worship.

Proper noun capitalized: Jinja

Jinja

  1. A city and district at the north end of Lake Victoria, Uganda.
    • If cities ailed, Jinja had sleeping sickness. Idi Amin’s sudden expulsion of whites and Asians back in 1972 had hit the city harder than anywhere else. In just over a decade, Jinja’s status as the country’s largest industrial city had become questionable.2020, Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, The First Woman, Oneworld Publications, page 372

Forms of jinja

pluraljinjas
pluraljinja

Origin of jinja

Borrowed from Japanese 神社 (じんじゃ, jinja), from Middle Chinese 神社, from Old Chinese 神社 (“sacrificial altar, shrine”), from 神 (*hlin, “deity, divine”) + 社 (*ɦljaːʔ, “Earth deity [and altar]”). Cognate with Mandarin 神社 (shénshè, “shrine”).

Questions about jinja

What does jinja mean?
Jinja means a Shinto place of worship.
What part of speech is jinja?
Jinja can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of jinja?
The plural of jinja is jinjas.

Words near jinja in the dictionary

  1. Jinhu
  2. Jinhua
  3. Jinhua ham
  4. Jinhua hams
  5. Jining
  6. jinja
  7. jinjall
  8. jinjalls
  9. jinjas
  10. Jinjee
  11. Jinji

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jinja (page history and authors); Jinja (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.

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