"purple triangle" meaning in English

See purple triangle in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: purple triangles [plural]
Etymology: From the symbol worn by Jehovah's Witnesses at Nazi concentration camps. Head templates: {{en-noun}} purple triangle (plural purple triangles)
  1. (historical, rare) A Jehovah's Witness in Nazi Germany. Wikipedia link: purple triangle Tags: historical, rare Related terms: pink triangle, yellow star
    Sense id: en-purple_triangle-en-noun-4oJedE9- Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for purple triangle meaning in English (2.0kB)

{
  "etymology_text": "From the symbol worn by Jehovah's Witnesses at Nazi concentration camps.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "purple triangles",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "purple triangle (plural purple triangles)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        {
          "kind": "other",
          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
          "parents": [
            "Entries with incorrect language header",
            "Entry maintenance"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2004, M. James Penton, quoting Jolene Chu, “Purple Triangles: A Story of Spiritual Resistance”, in Judaism Today, Spring 1999, issue 12, →ISSN, pages 15–19, quoted in “Evaluating the Arguments and the Evidence”, in Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich: Sectarian Politics Under Persecution, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, page 88",
          "text": "Survivor Max Liebster recalls that the SS there isolated the Witnesses and declared their barracks off limits to other prisoners. In Melk, Polish survivor Joseph Kempler says he saw ‘a camp within a camp’ and was told that the SS kept the ‘purple triangles’ in it, dangerous prisoners because they taught the Bible.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013 November 13, April Voytko Kempler, The Altered I: Memoir of Holocaust Survivor Joseph Kempler, LeRue Press (LRP), page 211",
          "text": "I could tell it was a purple triangle coming down the camp street even before I saw the color of their triangle. They walked differently. The Jews and other prisoners shambled along, scuffling their feet, eyes downcast.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A Jehovah's Witness in Nazi Germany."
      ],
      "id": "en-purple_triangle-en-noun-4oJedE9-",
      "links": [
        [
          "Jehovah's Witness",
          "Jehovah's Witness"
        ],
        [
          "Nazi Germany",
          "Nazi Germany"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(historical, rare) A Jehovah's Witness in Nazi Germany."
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "pink triangle"
        },
        {
          "word": "yellow star"
        }
      ],
      "tags": [
        "historical",
        "rare"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "purple triangle"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "purple triangle"
}
{
  "etymology_text": "From the symbol worn by Jehovah's Witnesses at Nazi concentration camps.",
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "purple triangles",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {},
      "expansion": "purple triangle (plural purple triangles)",
      "name": "en-noun"
    }
  ],
  "lang": "English",
  "lang_code": "en",
  "pos": "noun",
  "related": [
    {
      "word": "pink triangle"
    },
    {
      "word": "yellow star"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
    {
      "categories": [
        "English countable nouns",
        "English entries with incorrect language header",
        "English lemmas",
        "English multiword terms",
        "English nouns",
        "English terms with historical senses",
        "English terms with quotations",
        "English terms with rare senses"
      ],
      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "2004, M. James Penton, quoting Jolene Chu, “Purple Triangles: A Story of Spiritual Resistance”, in Judaism Today, Spring 1999, issue 12, →ISSN, pages 15–19, quoted in “Evaluating the Arguments and the Evidence”, in Jehovah's Witnesses and the Third Reich: Sectarian Politics Under Persecution, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, page 88",
          "text": "Survivor Max Liebster recalls that the SS there isolated the Witnesses and declared their barracks off limits to other prisoners. In Melk, Polish survivor Joseph Kempler says he saw ‘a camp within a camp’ and was told that the SS kept the ‘purple triangles’ in it, dangerous prisoners because they taught the Bible.",
          "type": "quotation"
        },
        {
          "ref": "2013 November 13, April Voytko Kempler, The Altered I: Memoir of Holocaust Survivor Joseph Kempler, LeRue Press (LRP), page 211",
          "text": "I could tell it was a purple triangle coming down the camp street even before I saw the color of their triangle. They walked differently. The Jews and other prisoners shambled along, scuffling their feet, eyes downcast.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A Jehovah's Witness in Nazi Germany."
      ],
      "links": [
        [
          "Jehovah's Witness",
          "Jehovah's Witness"
        ],
        [
          "Nazi Germany",
          "Nazi Germany"
        ]
      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(historical, rare) A Jehovah's Witness in Nazi Germany."
      ],
      "tags": [
        "historical",
        "rare"
      ],
      "wikipedia": [
        "purple triangle"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "purple triangle"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 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.