"spring-heeled Jack" meaning in All languages combined

See spring-heeled Jack on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: spring-heeled Jacks [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun|head=spring-heeled Jack}} spring-heeled Jack (plural spring-heeled Jacks)
  1. (historical, folklore) A terrifying man of bizarre appearance and able to make extraordinary leaps, the subject of English folklore of the Victorian era. Wikipedia link: spring-heeled Jack Tags: historical Categories (topical): Folklore

Inflected forms

{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "spring-heeled Jacks",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "head": "spring-heeled Jack"
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  "lang_code": "en",
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  "senses": [
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          "name": "English entries with incorrect language header",
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        },
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          "kind": "other",
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        },
        {
          "kind": "topical",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Folklore",
          "orig": "en:Folklore",
          "parents": [
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            "Society",
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            "Fundamental"
          ],
          "source": "w"
        }
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1863, Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby:",
          "text": "And he rattled, thumped, brandished his thunderbox, yelled, shouted, raved, roared, stamped, and danced corrobory like any black fellow; and then he touched a spring in the thunderbox, and out popped turnip-ghosts and magic-lanthorns and pasteboard bogies and spring-heeled Jacks and sallaballas […]",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1887, English Dialect Society, Publications, volume 21, number 53, page 367:",
          "text": "Servant-girls who have just received their year's wages at Christmas will frequently profess themselves afraid to go home after dusk, because “there are so many o' these Spring-heeled Jacks about.”",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1953, John B. Cairns, Bright and early: a bookseller's memories of Edinburgh and Lasswade:",
          "text": "London and Edinburgh had their spring-heeled jacks long before they appeared in Lasswade in Johnny's time. As long ago as 1837 a real, flesh-and-blood ghost in the shape of a spring-heeled jack was caught by a London policeman […]",
          "type": "quote"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "A terrifying man of bizarre appearance and able to make extraordinary leaps, the subject of English folklore of the Victorian era."
      ],
      "id": "en-spring-heeled_Jack-en-noun-ExFpVk1S",
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        "(historical, folklore) A terrifying man of bizarre appearance and able to make extraordinary leaps, the subject of English folklore of the Victorian era."
      ],
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      "wikipedia": [
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      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "spring-heeled Jack"
}
{
  "forms": [
    {
      "form": "spring-heeled Jacks",
      "tags": [
        "plural"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "head_templates": [
    {
      "args": {
        "head": "spring-heeled Jack"
      },
      "expansion": "spring-heeled Jack (plural spring-heeled Jacks)",
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  ],
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  "lang_code": "en",
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        "Pages with 1 entry",
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        "Quotation templates to be cleaned",
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        {
          "ref": "1863, Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby:",
          "text": "And he rattled, thumped, brandished his thunderbox, yelled, shouted, raved, roared, stamped, and danced corrobory like any black fellow; and then he touched a spring in the thunderbox, and out popped turnip-ghosts and magic-lanthorns and pasteboard bogies and spring-heeled Jacks and sallaballas […]",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1887, English Dialect Society, Publications, volume 21, number 53, page 367:",
          "text": "Servant-girls who have just received their year's wages at Christmas will frequently profess themselves afraid to go home after dusk, because “there are so many o' these Spring-heeled Jacks about.”",
          "type": "quote"
        },
        {
          "ref": "1953, John B. Cairns, Bright and early: a bookseller's memories of Edinburgh and Lasswade:",
          "text": "London and Edinburgh had their spring-heeled jacks long before they appeared in Lasswade in Johnny's time. As long ago as 1837 a real, flesh-and-blood ghost in the shape of a spring-heeled jack was caught by a London policeman […]",
          "type": "quote"
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      ],
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      ],
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      ],
      "raw_glosses": [
        "(historical, folklore) A terrifying man of bizarre appearance and able to make extraordinary leaps, the subject of English folklore of the Victorian era."
      ],
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        "historical"
      ],
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}

Download raw JSONL data for spring-heeled Jack meaning in All languages combined (2.2kB)


This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-11-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-10-02 using wiktextract (fbeafe8 and 7f03c9b). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.