shibboleth [M17th] The people of Gilead, east of the river Jordan, and members of the Hebrew tribe of Ephraim did not speak the same dialect, and neither were they the best of friends. The Book of Judges recounts a battle between them, in which Jephthah told his men, the Gileadites, to identify defeated Ephraimites by asking them to say ‘shibboleth’, a Hebrew word meaning ‘ear of corn’ or ‘stream in flood’. Ephraimites had difficulty in pronouncing sh, and if a soldier said ‘sibboleth’ then he was killed as an enemy. Since the mid 17th century English speakers have used shibboleth for ‘a word used to detect foreigners or strangers’, and in the early 19th century extended this to ‘a custom, principle, or belief that distinguishes a particular class or group’. It now especially refers to a long-standing belief regarded as outmoded or no longer important.