jacks
- 1Plural of jack.
Movers used hydraulic jacks to raise the old house off its foundation.
She laid down a pair of jacks and took the pot.
- 2A children's game played by picking up small objects.
Down the block, children were playing hopscotch, tag, and jacks on the warm sidewalk.
Jacks takes a quick hand and a sharp eye, and my grandmother could still beat us at it.
Similarknucklebones, jackstones
Note
The same game also goes by jackstones and knucklebones. As its name, jacks is uncountable and takes a singular verb (jacks is easy to learn), and it follows play with no article: the children played jacks after school. It turns up in lists of children's pastimes beside hide-and-seek, kick-the-can and tops.
- 3In poker, a hand holding a pair of jacks.
She raised before the flop with jacks, then folded when an ace hit the board.
He lost the biggest pot of the night with pocket jacks.
Note
At the poker table a pair goes by its rank alone, so jacks means two jacks in one hand, just as kings or aces means a pair of those. The shorthand also anchors the draw-poker rule jacks or better, under which nobody may open the betting without at least a pair of jacks.
- 4Alternative form of jakes: an outhouse or lavatory.
Back in a minute, I'm just running to the jacks.
Somebody has locked himself in the jacks again, and there's a queue down the corridor.
Note
A respelling of jakes that survives mainly in Ireland, where it is an everyday slang word for the toilet. It almost always takes the: off to the jacks, a queue for the jacks. Among friends it is unremarkable, but where a polite word is wanted, or outside Ireland, toilet is safer.
- 5Heroin tablets, from the rhyming slang jacks and jills for pills.
When the officers searched him, they turned up a handful of jacks in his jacket pocket.
Word on the estate was that Danny had started dealing jacks again.
Note
The rhyme does its work out of earshot: the full phrase rhymes on jills, but only jacks is spoken, so the slang hides its own key. It is British street slang for heroin in tablet form, the language of crime writing such as R. Tyler's Heroin Guns (2011); anywhere else, a listener will hear one of the word's everyday meanings.
jacks is a form of jack
jack, noun: A socket into which a plug fits to connect a device to a circuit, network, or the like. Full entry
- Forms
- jackjacks plural
- Spelling
- jack → jacks: add -s
- Sound
- The ending sounds like /s/.
Practice
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