jacket

UK/ˈd͡ʒæk.ɪt/US/ˈd͡ʒæk.ɪt/

nounA12 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,026 of 15,258leans spoken

Other forms: jackets

A jacket is a short coat worn over your other clothes. It stops at the hip rather than the knee.

That length is exactly what makes it a jacket rather than a coat. English keeps one for every occasion — a suit jacket, a denim jacket, a life jacket, a dinner jacket. The word also covers coverings that have nothing to do with clothing: the dust jacket of a book, the jacket of a hot water tank, and a jacket potato, which is one baked in its skin.

Definitions of jacket

1nounjacketA short coat worn over other clothes.A1~86%
“He hung his jacket on the back of the chair.”
2nouncoveringAn outer covering for something.B2~14%
“The book still had its dust jacket.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Where it comes from

Middle French
jacquet
English, today
jacket

Borrowed from Middle French jacquet, from fro + jaque. From Middle French jacquet, diminutive of Old French jaque.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Clothes & Fashion, A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 2 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

jacket in the wild

The first dinner jacket is traditionally traced to 1865 on the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII.
Black tie
Thus in many non-English languages, a dinner jacket is still known as the false friend "smoking".
Black tie
Anoraks are usually shorter than parkas, often hip-length, and are traditionally a pull-over jacket.
Parka
The back of a dust jacket often has a barcode for retail purchase, and the book's ISBN.
Dust jacket
The dust jacket protects the book covers from damage.
Dust jacket

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

Definitions of jacket

1nounjacketA short coat worn over other clothes.A1~86%

“He hung his jacket on the back of the chair.”

2nouncoveringAn outer covering for something.B2~14%

“The book still had its dust jacket.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.