bluejacket

Noun

bluejacket (plural bluejackets)

1. A seaman of a British warship
   • It never entered his mind that here was a matter which from its extreme questionableness, it was his duty as a loyal blue-jacket to report in the proper quarter.1924, Herman Melville, chapter 13, in Billy Budd, London: Constable & Co.
   • ‘[…] I’m not sure’, she continued, ‘that I won’t throw myself overboard, for the mere pleasure of being rescued by a blue-jacket […]’1928, Virginia Woolf, chapter 4, in Orlando: A Biography, London: The Hogarth Press, →OCLC; republished as Orlando: A Biography (eBook no. 0200331h.html), Australia: Project Gutenberg Australia, July...

   Synonyms:

   sailor

2. An enlisted man in the US Navy.
   • […] drift like tear-starting smoke across these exciting pages written by a bluejacket of the U.S. Navy.1939, Fred J. Buenzle, Arthur Grove Day, Bluejacket: An Autobiography, page 12
3. A uniformed policeman.
   • He told me that Buster took her face 'bout right off. Said there's guts and hair everyplace. There's a platoon or so of Payton's bluejackets up there on the View now.1991, Stephen King, Needful Things
4. An Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis).

   Synonyms:

   Confederate spiderwort, snotgrass, snot grass, snotweed, cowslobber