Jackknife

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    Alternative spelling of jack-knife. alt-of, alternative

    "[…] near it is a cluster of weapons of villanous aspect, comprising every thing from a Malayan creese to a sailor's jackknife or a Smith & Wesson revolver."

  2. 2
    a dive in which the diver bends to touch the ankles before straightening out wordnet
  3. 3
    A resampling method that applies estimators to all subsamples that each omit a single different group (possibly of a single datapoint) of the original sample to provide a sample distribution of the estimate.
  4. 4
    a large knife with one or more folding blades wordnet
Verb
  1. 1
    Alternative form of jack-knife. alt-of, alternative
  2. 2
    dive into the water bending the body at the waist at a right angle, like a jackknife wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
adzaxbelly busterbelly flopbelly whopperblade

Example

More examples

"[…] near it is a cluster of weapons of villanous aspect, comprising every thing from a Malayan creese to a sailor's jackknife or a Smith & Wesson revolver."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.