"John Henry" meaning in English

See John Henry in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-John Henry.ogg [Australia] Forms: John Henrys [plural]
Etymology: Believed to be a Western United States cowboy variation (dating from the late 1700s or early 1800s) of John Hancock, the first person to sign the United States Declaration of Independence and whose name later became a synonym for a signature. This usage predates the American folklore hero John Henry from the 1870s. Head templates: {{en-noun|s}} John Henry (plural John Henrys)
  1. (idiomatic) One's signature. Tags: idiomatic Related terms: John Hancock

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for John Henry meaning in English (1.9kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "Believed to be a Western United States cowboy variation (dating from the late 1700s or early 1800s) of John Hancock, the first person to sign the United States Declaration of Independence and whose name later became a synonym for a signature. This usage predates the American folklore hero John Henry from the 1870s.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "John Henrys",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
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      "expansion": "John Henry (plural John Henrys)",
      "name": "en-noun"
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  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
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        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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          "name": "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
          "parents": [
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      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1986, L. Ron Hubbard, Villainy Victorious: Mission Earth",
          "text": "They stepped forward. Bury held a pen at them. “So if you fellows will just put your John Henrys on this document, it's all legal.” The two privates signed it.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "One's signature."
      ],
      "id": "en-John_Henry-en-noun-v69x-nLt",
      "links": [
        [
          "signature",
          "signature"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) One's signature."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "John Hancock"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-John Henry.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/69/En-au-John_Henry.ogg/En-au-John_Henry.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/En-au-John_Henry.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "John Henry"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "Believed to be a Western United States cowboy variation (dating from the late 1700s or early 1800s) of John Hancock, the first person to sign the United States Declaration of Independence and whose name later became a synonym for a signature. This usage predates the American folklore hero John Henry from the 1870s.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "John Henrys",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "1": "s"
      },
      "expansion": "John Henry (plural John Henrys)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "related": [
    {
      "word": "John Hancock"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English entries with language name categories using raw markup",
        "English eponyms",
        "English idioms",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with audio links",
        "English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "Quotation templates to be cleaned"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1986, L. Ron Hubbard, Villainy Victorious: Mission Earth",
          "text": "They stepped forward. Bury held a pen at them. “So if you fellows will just put your John Henrys on this document, it's all legal.” The two privates signed it.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "One's signature."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "signature",
          "signature"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(idiomatic) One's signature."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "idiomatic"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "sounds": [
    {
      "audio": "En-au-John Henry.ogg",
      "mp3_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/transcoded/6/69/En-au-John_Henry.ogg/En-au-John_Henry.ogg.mp3",
      "ogg_url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/En-au-John_Henry.ogg",
      "tags": [
        "Australia"
      ],
      "text": "Audio (AU)"
    }
  ],
  "word": "John Henry"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-05 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.