Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun derogatory One who prefers English attitudes, customs or lifestyle to Irish ones.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Irish seonín, from Seon ‘John’ + -ín diminutive suffix.

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Examples

  • So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all to that.

    Ulysses 2003

  • And it was scarcely to be supposed the poet of the Roisín Dubh had in mind the coming of a shoneen talking-house, a gombeen legislature scrounged and cadged for by whiskey-swilling fixers in the imperial Parliament across the sea.

    At Swim, Two Boys Jamie O’Neill 2002

  • And it was scarcely to be supposed the poet of the Roisín Dubh had in mind the coming of a shoneen talking-house, a gombeen legislature scrounged and cadged for by whiskey-swilling fixers in the imperial Parliament across the sea.

    At Swim, Two Boys Jamie O’Neill 2002

  • But these shoneen men of Presentation are Englified to the core, if such could be said to have a core.

    At Swim, Two Boys Jamie O’Neill 2002

  • But these shoneen men of Presentation are Englified to the core, if such could be said to have a core.

    At Swim, Two Boys Jamie O’Neill 2002

  • And he a more miserable shoneen than his old crawthumping humbug of a father.

    Duty, and other Irish Comedies Seumas O'Brien

  • It was not pleasant listening to, or seeing, "The Piper," to many groups of Irishmen, for it cut alike at the Parliamentary Nationalists, the Sein Feiner, and the shoneen.

    Irish Plays and Playwrights Cornelius Weygandt 1914

  • So off they started about Irish sports and shoneen games the like of lawn tennis and about hurley and putting the stone and racy of the soil and building up a nation once again and all to that.

    Ulysses James Joyce 1911

  • Under the auspices of the Board of Erin "the shoneen" -- the most contemptible of all our

    Ireland Since Parnell 1910

  • We are served up puppets representing the shoneen with a lisp set over against the patriot who says all the proper things suitable to the occasion.

    Principles of Freedom 1899

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