Word.ws English Dictionary

Jonestown

Jonestown proper noun: a former settlement in northern Guyana founded by the Peoples Temple cult, and the site of an infamous mass murder-suicide in November 1978.

Proper noun

Jonestown

  1. A former settlement in northern Guyana founded by the Peoples Temple cult, and the site of an infamous mass murder-suicide in November 1978.
  2. (informal) The Jonestown massacre itself.
  3. Any of a number of other places in the English-speaking world.

Noun

Jonestown (plural Jonestowns)

  1. Any mass suicide or murder, especially one with religious or cultic overtones.

Forms of Jonestown

pluralJonestowns

Origin of Jonestown

From Jones + town, after Reverend Jim Jones, leader of the Peoples Temple.

Words formed from Jonestown

Questions about Jonestown

What does Jonestown mean?
Jonestown means a former settlement in northern Guyana founded by the Peoples Temple cult, and the site of an infamous mass murder-suicide in November 1978.
What part of speech is Jonestown?
Jonestown can be a proper noun or a noun.

Words near Jonestown in the dictionary

  1. jonesin'
  2. jonesing
  3. jonesite
  4. Jonesport
  5. Jonesses
  6. Jonestown
  7. Jonestowner
  8. Jonestowners
  9. Jonestowns
  10. Jonesville
  11. Jonesvillian

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Jonestown (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:

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