Lebanese means of Lebanon, or a person from Lebanon. You can say Lebanese food, a Lebanese passport, Lebanese Arabic. As a noun, a Lebanese is a person from that country; the plural is often Lebanese as well (the Lebanese, two Lebanese students). The country sits on the Mediterranean, between Israel and Syria. It was once rich, a place tourists loved, and a busy centre for business and money. A long civil war in the 1970s and 1980s tore through it, with political and religious groups fighting, and with Israel, Syria, and the PLO mixed up in the fighting. The old picture of a glittering, easy Lebanon is what many older books still give you; people who are Lebanese will tell you the story did not stop in the 1980s, and life there has often been hard since. The word itself is about the people and the things of the country, not the country's name.