Joan of Arc
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Appellativisation of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc), the name of a 15th century French folk heroine revered as a martyr.
The name itself is a calque of French Jeanne d’Arc. According to surviving signatures, her Old French given name was Jehanne, feminine form of Jehan (cognate in English to John). In the English language, her first name has been repeated as Joan since the fifteenth century because that was the only English equivalent for the feminine form of John during her lifetime, Jane not being attested until later. She did not come from a place called Arc; d'Arc was attributed because of her father's surname, which was most likely Darc. Apostrophes were never used in fifteenth-century French surnames, which sometimes leads to confusion when analyzing such names. See Wikipedia (Name of Joan of Arc) for more.
Noun
[edit]Joan of Arc (plural Joans of Arc or Joan of Arcs)
- (figuratively) A brave, visionary, or martial woman.
- 2013, Arcade Fire, “Joan of Arc”, in Reflektor:
- And they're the ones that put you down/ 'Cause they got no heart / But I'm the one that will follow you / You're my Joan of Arc
- 2020, Lindsay Harroff, “From Sitting In to Sitting Out: Gloria Richardson and the 1963 Cambridge Movement”, in Lesli K. Pace, Sean Patrick O'Rourke, editors, Like Wildfire: The Rhetoric of the Civil Rights Sit-Ins[1], page 204:
- Volatile yet stubborn, self-interested yet a modern Joan of Arc—criticisms of Richardson were as contradictory as they claimed her to be.
- 2021, Steve Giblin, Jon Land, Walking in Mud: A Navy SEAL’s 10 Rules for Surviving the New Normal, unnumbered page:
- Digressing a bit, the mission statement of this chapter is to illustrate the example set for all of us by the Joan of Arcs of today—women who serve in Special Operations in particular, and the military in general […]
Related terms
[edit]Further reading
[edit]- “Joan of Arc”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.
- “Joan of Arc”, in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1996–present.
- “Joan of Arc”, in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016, →ISBN.
- “Joan of Arc”, in Collins English Dictionary.
- “Joan of Arc”, in Dictionary.com Unabridged, Dictionary.com, LLC, 1995–present.