jacket

Pluraljackets

Formsjackets, jacketing, jacketed

1. 1
   nouncountable

   An outer garment for the upper body, worn over a shirt or blouse, usually reaching from the waist to the thigh.

   He pulled on a light jacket as the evening cooled.

   The tailored jacket fit perfectly across her shoulders.

   Similarcoat

   Note

   The garment the other senses grow from. The word came through Middle French jacquet, a diminutive of Old French jaque, so a jacket was first a 'little jaque.' Many later senses keep its picture of something fitted snugly around the outside: the protective cover, the gun-barrel band, even a potato's skin.

2. 2
   nouncountable

   The upper part of a suit, worn over a shirt alongside the pants and sometimes a vest.

   The jacket of his navy suit was cut slightly too narrow at the shoulders.

   A well-pressed jacket pulls a formal outfit together.

   Similarcoat

   Note

   Suit vocabulary splits along national lines here. In American usage this piece is also called the coat, so suit coat and suit jacket name the same garment. The other pieces change names too: trousers become pants, and the waistcoat becomes a vest. In Appalachian speech, that vest can itself be called a sleeveless jacket.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A protective or insulating covering placed around an object, such as a book, a hot water tank, or a bullet.

   A protective jacket around the pipe prevents heat loss in winter.

   Engineers fitted a steel jacket over the reactor vessel for insulation.

   Similarcasing, sheath, covering, shell, sleeve

4. 4
   nouncountable

   The tough skin left on a potato when it is baked whole.

   The jacket turns crisp and golden when the potato is baked at high heat.

   Many people leave the jacket on for extra fiber and flavor.

   Similarskin, peel

   Note

   A cook's word that is most at home in the plural with a possessive. Potatoes are cooked or served in their jackets, meaning with the skin left on. The same idea gives jacket potato, the name for a whole potato baked in its skin. In this phrase the potato itself, not the skin, is what the word names.

5. 5
   verbtransitive

   To enclose or encase an object in a jacket or other protective covering.

   Technicians jacket the hot water tank to reduce heat loss.

   The factory jackets every wire in colored plastic before shipping.

   Similarencase, sheathe, wrap, insulate, cover

   Oppositestrip

   Note

   A verb from workshops and laboratories. Engineers jacket a chimney or a mercury tube against heat loss, and fossil hunters jacket an exposed jaw to protect it. It always takes a direct object. The double-t spellings jacketting and jacketted appear in technical prose but are rare; jacketing and jacketed are the standard forms.

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To restrain a person by confining them in a straitjacket.

   Orderlies moved to jacket the struggling patient before he hurt himself.

   In the old asylum they would jacket anyone deemed uncontrollable.

   Similarstraitjacket

   Note

   Here the straitjacket is implied rather than named. Thomas Holcroft's Anna St. Ives (1792) uses it in a threat: 'I'll have you jacketed.' That 'have someone done' construction puts the act in other hands. Straitjacket also works as a verb and is the clearer choice, since bare jacket can just as easily mean to encase in a covering.

7. 7
   nouncountable

   A reinforcing band that surrounds and strengthens the tube of a gun in which the charge is fired.

   The gun's jacket was forged from a single piece of steel.

   Engineers reinforced the barrel with a shrunk-on jacket to withstand higher pressures.

   Note

   A gunmaker's sense, distinct from a cover that merely protects. The jacket is shrunk or forged around the inner tube of a barrel. It puts that tube under pre-stress, so the whole assembly can withstand the pressure of the firing charge. In ordnance writing it pairs naturally with tube: the tube holds the charge, and the jacket holds the tube.

8. 8
   nounslangcountable

   A person's criminal record as kept on file by the police.

   His jacket showed three arrests but no convictions.

   With his jacket, one more arrest means real prison time.

   Similarrecord, file

   Note

   Street and squad-room slang for the file that follows a person through the system. It nearly always takes a possessive: my jacket, Yo's jacket, somebody's jacket. The verbs around it are reading verbs, since a jacket shows charges and an investigator looks one up. Richard Price and Spike Lee's Clockers (1995) and Inherent Vice (2014) both use it in dialogue. Keep it to speech and informal writing.

9. 9
   noundialectalAppalachiacountable

   A sleeveless garment worn over a shirt, often beneath a suit coat; the garment most Americans call a vest and the British call a waistcoat.

   He tucked his pocket watch into his jacket and slid his suit coat on over it before church.

   Grandpa buttoned his wool jacket over his flannel shirt, and with no sleeves to bind him he swung the ax all morning.

   Similarvest, waistcoat

   Note

   In Appalachian speech the word names the sleeveless garment buttoned over a shirt. Elsewhere it calls up the everyday sleeved jacket, so a listener from outside the region may picture the wrong garment entirely. In general American English the usual word is vest, and in British English it is waistcoat.

10. 10
    nounJamaicacountable

    An illegitimate child, especially one whose supposed father is unaware that he is not the biological father.

    The whole parish suspected the youngest was a jacket fathered by another man.

    He went to his grave never knowing the child was a jacket.

    Note

    A Jamaican usage with a sting in it. Calling a child a jacket claims that the man raising the child is not the father and does not know it. Because the word carries that accusation, it belongs to gossip and insult rather than neutral description. Outside Jamaica, listeners will simply hear a word for clothing.

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