The name of a small settlement in the jungle of Guyana, in South America, built in the 1970s by an American religious group called the Peoples Temple and named after its leader, Jim Jones. About nine hundred people lived there. On 18 November 1978, almost all of them died in one day — over nine hundred people, a third of them children — after drinking a fruit drink mixed with poison. Some drank it because Jones told them to; others were made to. It is usually called the Jonestown Massacre. In English today the word is almost never used to talk about the place itself. People say it when they want to name the worst thing a group can become: a leader nobody is allowed to question, followers who have cut themselves off from family and from the outside world, and a group that would rather die together than admit it was wrong. So you hear it in sentences like 'this is starting to feel like Jonestown' about a company, a political group, or an online community — a strong, unfriendly thing to say, and not something you would use lightly. The very common phrase 'drink the Kool-Aid', meaning to accept what a group believes without thinking, comes from this event, though it is now used lightly, often about work, in a way that many people find uncomfortable once they know where it came from.