1 definition by Jimmy Jawn
The word "Jawn" is an artifact of the Philadelphia/Eastern PA/South Jersey area accent, and it's pronounced like "John" but spelled "Jawn" mainly to mess with people's heads. People started saying it in the early 2000's, but it's meaning "evolved". Initially it meant "penis" and seemed to be a shortening of the slang "Johnson" or a combination of "Johnson & Dong". In the Philly accent, people emphasize the "nouns" in a sentence and drop or "slur together" everything else. So a sentence like "I have to got to go to the Store" becomes "I gotta-go-ta-duh Store" the nouns "I & Store" are the only important information, and the rest of the words in the sentence get run together, because "why both with that shit?" ...So Jawn became the word for any "unknown noun", was generally used in the form of a question, and that's probably because it rhymes with the language used for "trying to figure out information" ...for example "what's WRONG?" "what's goin' ON?" "has it been that LONG?" "where's it GONE?" ...and "what's the name of that SONG?" is probably the most likely evolution of Jawn going from meaning "Dong" to "Song" to any "unknown noun" ...anybody who says the word Jawn "came from New York and means Joint" is full-a-shit, cause Joint and Jawn don't rhyme. No one in Philly would use the word Joint in the same context as Jawn. "Joint" is "something known", "Jawn" is "the unknown" and is spelled so strangely "because" it's the word for a thing you don't know ...get it?
What's goin' on with dat Jawn? I seen them Jawns in my front lawn, at the break a dawn, and thought somethin' must be wrong, cause I don't know what's goin' on with that Jawn.
by Jimmy Jawn December 27, 2021