jerk water
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.99 in modern English
23
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
verb
To fill a steam locomotive water tank manually from natural water supplies (a hypothetical process whose use has been discredited).
American usage
Example Sentences
- "The Santa Fe, called the Jerk Water route because they "jerked" water from ponds and wallows for the engine, still frayed out at the Kansas line."
- "[…] 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."
- "In 1870 at Montrose, N.Y., the New York Central made the first installation of a track pan and scoop to permit locomotives to take water on the fly. Since these installations invariably were in tiny communities, and since they permitted locomotives literally to “jerk water”"
- "The early, crude "jerk water" device applied by the New York Central is shown in figure 8.24."
- "Towns with track pans no longer had as many trains stop there, and they became derisively known as “jerkwater” towns, where the trains would jerk water and just keep on going."
- "c. 1920, Ring Lardner, The Real Dope But any way from the number of jerk water burgs we went through you would think we was on the Monon and the towns all looks so much like the other that […]."
Usage
- American usage
- Dated
- Colloquial
- Derogatory
Inflected Forms
jerks water (present, singular)
jerking water (participle, present)
jerked water (participle, past)
jerked water (past)
more jerk water (comparative)
most jerk water (superlative)