Word.ws English Dictionary

not happy, Jan

not happy, Jan phrase: used to express displeasure at someone else's incompetence.

Phrase

not happy, Jan

  1. (Australia) Used to express displeasure at someone else's incompetence.
    • One young chick is standing on its toes, flapping crazily, squawking a long ‘not-happy-Jan’ cry in penguin-speak.2011, Craig Cormick, In Bed with Douglas Mawson: Travels Around Antarctica, unnumbered page
    • For quotations using this term, see Citations:not happy, Jan.

Origin of not happy, Jan

Made famous by a television advertisement for Sensis's (Telstra's Directories and Advertising division) Yellow Pages product, which was aired in Australia from 2000–2003. See the Wikipedia article.

Questions about not happy, Jan

What does not happy, Jan mean?
Not happy, Jan means used to express displeasure at someone else's incompetence.
What part of speech is not happy, Jan?
Not happy, Jan is a phrase.

Words near not happy, Jan in the dictionary

  1. not grow on trees
  2. not guilties
  3. not guilty
  4. not half
  5. not half bad
  6. not happy, Jan
  7. not hardly
  8. not have a bean
  9. not have a care in the world
  10. not have a clue
  11. not have a leg to stand on

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: not happy, Jan (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-Not happy Jan.ogg.

Cite this entry: “not happy, Jan.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/not_happy%2C_jan. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.