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''jockey'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20250819013912-00-⌔

jockey - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

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Noun

jockey (plural jockeys)

  • One who rides racehorses competitively.
  • That part of a variable resistor or potentiometer that rides over the resistance wire
  • (in combination) An operator of some machinery or apparatus.
  • (dated) A dealer in horses; a horse trader.
    • ✤ And the crime for which Nuncomar was about to die was regarded by them in much the same light in which the selling of an unsound horse, for a sound price, is regarded by a Yorkshire jockey.1
  • (dated) A cheat; one given to sharp practice in trade.
  • (UK, crime, slang) A prostitute’s client.
  • (Ireland, crime, slang) A rapist.

Verb

jockey (third-person singular simple present jockeys, present participle jockeying, simple past and past participle jockeyed)

  • To ride (a horse) in a race.
  • To jostle by riding against.
    • ✤ They were jockeying for position toward the end of the race.
    • ✤ I love jockeying that motorcycle through heavy traffic.
  • To maneuver (something) by skill; especially, to do so for one’s advantage.
    • ✤ They’re all jockeying for promotion.
    • ✤ This particularly obtains in all Parliamentary affairs. Whether the business in hand be to get a man in, or get a man out, or get a man over, or promote a railway, or jockey a railway, or what else, nothing is understood to be so effectual as scouring nowhere in a violent hurry—in short, as taking cabs and going about.2
  • To cheat or trick.
    • ✤ I’ve been jockeyed into doing work for which I get no credit.

Etymology

The word is by origin a diminutive of jock, the Northern English or Scots colloquial equivalent of the first name John, which is also used generically for “boy” or “fellow” (compare Jack, Dick), at least since 1529. A familiar instance of the use of the word as a name is in “Jockey of Norfolk” in Shakespeare’s Richard III. v. 3, 304. Equivalent to jock +‎ -ey.

In the 16th and 17th centuries the word was applied to horse-dealers, postilions, itinerant minstrels and vagabonds, and thus frequently bore the meaning of a cunning trickster, a “sharp”, whence the verb to jockey, “to outwit” or “to do” a person out of something. The current meaning of a person who rides a horse in races was first seen in 1670.

Pronunciation

  • (UK) IPA: /ˈd͡ʒɒki/
  • (US) IPA: /ˈd͡ʒɑki/
  • Audio (Australian): 🔊
  • Rhymes: -ɒki
  • Homophone: jocky

Printed 2026-06-28.

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Footnotes

  1. 1841, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Warren Hastings: ↩

  2. 1864 May – 1865 November, Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. […], volume, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1865, →OCLC: ↩

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