Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

jetlag

UK/ˈd͡ʒɛt.læɡ/US/ˈd͡ʒɛt.læɡ/
nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans spoken

Jetlag is the exhausted confusion after flying across time zones. Suffer from jetlag.

Flying east is worse, because the day is shortened and the body resists that more. Jetlag takes roughly a day per time zone to clear, whatever anybody claims.

Óscar (xindilo/fotosderianxo) · CC BY-SA 2.0

Definitions of jetlag

  1. 1nounjetlagThe exhausted confusion after flying across time zones.B2

    “The jetlag had him awake at four for a week.”

jetlag is a condition.

Also accepted in games: jet lag

Where it comes from

jet lag Possibly coined by Horace Sutton in 1966.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Travel & Transport

Practise this word

jetlag in the wild

  • The expression cultural jet lag (or cultural jetlag) was coined by Marc Perraud during his research into cross-cultural psychology.

    Cultural jet lag

  • Social jetlag, similar to jet lag, is a circadian misalignment.

    Social jetlag

  • According to PubMed, at least 26 articles have been published on social jetlag as of April 2025.

    Social jetlag

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.