noun (plural jockeys)
- Three of them became Irish champion jockey at various times between 1840 and 1882.
- Champion jockeys were soon riding on the Continent and in Ireland as well.
- Camejo is currently the meet's leading apprentice jockey with 30 races won through Tuesday.
- ‘Song of Rufus’ is the story of schizophrenic boxcar jockey Rufus, a man who follows a trail of music only he can hear.
- But the Scobleizer is no ordinary Windows-obsessed blog jockey.
- Jeff Markham is a simple gas jockey with a mysterious, violent past.
verb (jockeys, jockeyed)[no object]
- We hear endlessly this talk of a power struggle, different factions jockeying for position.
- Hands in pockets, they stand around jostling, jockeying for place, small fights breaking out and calming.
- Over 170,000 have voted since the poll began on Sunday 20 October and competition is intense with the ten contenders jockeying for position.
- He's diminutive enough to jockey a horse, but he's tough enough to wear down a defense.
- It is a competition where the elite use personal connections to jockey their cronies into key positions and thus win power and influence.
- It went down like this: In mid-January Darren was jockeying the phones at Atlantic Records on a weeklong temp assignment.
- Example sentences
- And if the proposed Scottish academy offers a professorship of all-weather jockeyship, only one Scot should be considered for the post.
- Even for a good cause, celebrity jockeyship doesn't bear thinking about.
- With three such talents plus McCoy and Tony Dobbin on this side of the water, Irish jockeyship is in good health.
Late 16th century: diminutive of Jock 'ordinary man; a rustic', Scots form of the given name Jack. The word came to mean 'mounted courier', hence the current sense (late 17th century). Another early use 'horse dealer' (long a byword for dishonesty) probably gave rise to the verb sense 'manipulate', whereas the main verb sense probably relates to the behavior of jockeys maneuvering for an advantageous position during a race.
A pet form of the man's name Jock, a northern form of jack, jockey was originally used, rather like Jack, for any ordinary man, boy, or underling. From this came a specialized sense of a servant as a mounted courier, which in the 17th century gave rise to today's meaning. In American slang a jockey was a specific kind of worker—so a beer jockey was a barmaid, a garage jockey a garage attendant, and a typewriter jockey a typist. From there it was natural to call someone who played records a disc jockey, in the 1940s.
Words that rhyme with jockeychoccy, cocky, flocky, gnocchi, hockey, oche, pocky, rocky, schlocky, stocky
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