Word.ws English Dictionary

jaw-dropping

Syllables: jaw-drop·ping/ˈd͡ʒɔː ˌdɹɒpɪŋ/US/ˈd͡ʒɔ ˌdɹɑpɪŋ/

jaw-dropping adjective: causing great awe or surprise.

Adjective

jaw-dropping (comparative more jaw-dropping, superlative most jaw-dropping)

  1. (informal) Causing great awe or surprise.
    • The acrobatic performance in the theater was jaw dropping.
    • Bag of Bones is, hands down, [Stephen] King's most narratively subversive fiction. Whenever you're positive–just positive!–you know where this ghost story is heading, that's exactly when it gallops off in some jaw-dropping new direction.1998 September 23, Tom De Haven, “Stephen King, Bag of Bones [book review]”, in Entertainment Weekly, New York, N.Y.: Entertainment Weekly, Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 24 Oct...

Examples of jaw-dropping in a sentence

  • [Iggy] Pop's was the most jaw-dropping stage show anywhere.1999, Tobias Hurwitz, “Pre-punk”, in Punk Guitar Styles: The Guitarist’s Guide to Music of the Masters (National Guitar Workshop Book), Van...
  • The plots of Mission: Impossible movies tend to be convoluted but negligible, really only there to provide connective tissue between jaw-dropping set pieces.2018 July 25, A. A. Dowd, “Fallout may be the Most Breathlessly Intense Mission: Impossible Adventure Yet”, in The A.V. Club, archived from...

Forms of jaw-dropping

comparativemore jaw-dropping
superlativemost jaw-dropping
alternative formjawdropping

Origin of jaw-dropping

A reference to a person’s mouth open wide in amazement or shock.

Words formed from jaw-dropping

Questions about jaw-dropping

What does jaw-dropping mean?
Jaw-dropping means causing great awe or surprise.
How do you use jaw-dropping in a sentence?
[Iggy] Pop's was the most jaw-dropping stage show anywhere.
What part of speech is jaw-dropping?
Jaw-dropping is an adjective.
How do you pronounce jaw-dropping?
Jaw-dropping is pronounced /ˈd͡ʒɔː ˌdɹɒpɪŋ/ (UK).

Words near jaw-dropping in the dictionary

  1. jaw-boxes
  2. jaw-breaker
  3. jaw-breakers
  4. jaw-dropper
  5. jaw-droppers
  6. jaw-dropping
  7. jaw-droppingly
  8. jaw-hole
  9. jaw-holes
  10. jaw-jack
  11. jaw-jacked

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jaw-dropping (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-jaw-dropping.wav.

Cite this entry: “jaw-dropping.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jaw-dropping. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.