Other forms: jockeys, jockeying
A jockey is the rider who races horses professionally. A champion jockey, the jockey was thrown, ride as a jockey.
Jockeys must be small and very strong, and weight is the constant discipline of the job — every horse carries a set weight and the jockey is most of what can be adjusted. Apprentice jockey and jump jockey are the standard divisions. As a verb, to jockey for position means to manoeuvre for advantage, from the shuffling for space in a race. Note disc jockey, shortened to DJ, which took the word into music.
1nounjockeyA professional rider in horse races.
“The jockey had ridden the horse only once before.”
2verbmanoeuvreTo manoeuvre for advantage.
“Three of them were jockeying for the same job.”
jockey is a rider.
Jockey began as a Scottish pet form of the name John, used for an ordinary man and then for a horse-dealer or rider. It is one of a handful of English common nouns — like jack and jill — made out of a first name.
From jock + -ey. The word is by origin a diminutive of jock, the Northern English or Scots colloquial equivalent of the first name John, which is also used generically for "boy" or "fellow" (compare Jack, Dick), at least since 1529. A familiar instance of the use of the word as a name is in "Jockey of Norfolk" in Shakespeare's Richard III. v. 3, 304. Equivalent to jock + -ey. In the 16th and 17th centuries the word was applied to horse-dealers, postilions, itinerant minstrels and vagabonds, and thus frequently bore the meaning of a cunning trickster, a "sharp", whence the verb to jockey, "to outwit" or "to do" a person out of something. The current meaning of a person who rides a horse in races was first seen in 1670.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Sports & Fitness, Horses & Riding