jail fodder
jail fodder noun: a person with criminal tendencies who is considered to be expendable, worth nothing more than to occupy a jail.
Noun
jail fodder (uncountable)
- A person with criminal tendencies who is considered to be expendable, worth nothing more than to occupy a jail.
- Philos grew redly truculent. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t need the advice of a lump of Jewish jailfodder—’1985, Anthony Burgess, chapter 4, in The Kingdom of the Wicked, London: Hutchinson
- Between 1718 and 1775, the empire transported about fifty thousand felons, more than half of all English emigrants to America during that period. The transported were overwhelmingly young, unmarried men with little or no economic skill: the cannon fodder of war and the jail fodder of peace.2001, Alan Taylor, chapter 14, in American Colonies, Penguin, published 2002, page 315
Forms of jail fodder
| alternative form | jailfodder |
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Origin of jail fodder
From jail + fodder, i.e. food to be fed to jails. Probably by analogy with cannon fodder.
Questions about jail fodder
- What does jail fodder mean?
- Jail fodder means a person with criminal tendencies who is considered to be expendable, worth nothing more than to occupy a jail.
- What part of speech is jail fodder?
- Jail fodder is a noun.
Words near jail fodder in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: jail fodder (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “jail fodder.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jail_fodder. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.