Jerkwater
adj, noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 A train on a branch line. US, historical
"[…] by bailing from near streams with buckets, (the brake-man called this operation jerking water) and from this the road gets its name of jerkwater road."
- 2 A jerkwater town.
"Twenty-five miles down the narrow arid highway, there is another town like Napoleon, a little smaller. And then twenty-five miles further, another. This chain of jerkwaters stretches for a lazy afternoon, until you finally encounter a cluster of people that almost resembles a modern civilization, with a movie theater and chain restaurants."
- 1 Of an inhabited place, small, insignificant, and backward. US, colloquial, derogatory
- 1 small and remote and insignificant wordnet
Example
More examples"[…] by bailing from near streams with buckets, (the brake-man called this operation jerking water) and from this the road gets its name of jerkwater road."
Etymology
From jerk (“to move with a sudden movement”) + water. Refers to the need to supply the boilers of steam trains with water. In rural areas and small towns with no water tower, where the train did not stop, this was done by scooping ("jerking") water from a track pan. First appears c. 1852, in the Miami County Sentinel (Peru, Indiana).
Related phrases
More for "jerkwater"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.