Noun: agunah
| Singular | agunah |
| Plural | agunahs; agunot; agunoth |
Sample Sentences
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A woman may become an agunah either through her husband's accidental disappearance or through his willful desertion, although accidental disappearance constitutes the main source of difficulty. [1986, Menachem M. Brayer, The Jewish Woman in Rabbinic Literature, page 187:]
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Widows, among them agunos, chose the Holy City as a way of expressing their eternal love for God. [1998, Dovid Rossoff, Where Heaven Touches Earth, page xii:]
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The problem of the agunah, the woman (or man) who is chained to a marriage and unable to free herself from this marriage, is not a new one. [2001, Michael J. Broyde, Marriage, Divorce, and the Abandoned Wife in Jewish Law:]
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Our Master could see the agony of his little relative who was not yet fifteen and was already an agunah. He put aside all his civic affairs and obligations and even his regular lectures on Maimonides and Alfasi and began to look into the matter of freeing this agunah. [2014, S. Y. Agnon, The Parable and Its Lesson: A Novella, pages 10–11:]
Nouns inflected like agunah
chavurah,
setumah,
genizah,
Torah,
chuppah,
kehillah,
hanukkiah,
haftorah,
haftarah,
kevutzah,
ketubah,
havurah,
ketubbah,
kvutzah,
mazzebah,
mezuzah,
agunah,
megillah,
chalah,
huppah, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
Borrowed from Hebrew עגונה (“chained woman”).