goon
noun/ɡuːn/
/ɡuːn/
(informal)- (especially North American English) a criminal who is paid to frighten or injure people
- Just call off your goons and no one will get hurt.
- The goons at the next table were just itching to finish him off.
Want to learn more?
Find out which words work together and produce more natural sounding English with the Oxford Collocations Dictionary app.
- (especially British English, old-fashioned) a stupid or silly person
Word Originmid 19th cent.: perhaps from dialect gooney ‘booby’; influenced by the subhuman cartoon character ‘Alice the Goon’, created by E. C. Segar (1894–1938), American cartoonist.
Check pronunciation:
goon