Word.ws English Dictionary

jaywalking

jaywalking noun: an act of behaving as a jaywalker. Also the present participle and gerund of jaywalk.

Noun

jaywalking (uncountable)

  1. An act of behaving as a jaywalker.
    • […] when he had felt unhappy over a movie theater large enough to contain ten times the population of Schoenstrom, and been cursed by a policeman for jaywalking, and had passed a hotel entirely full of diplomats and marble and caviare[…1919, Sinclair Lewis, Free Air, New York, N.Y.: Harcourt, Brace and Company, page 257
    • For decades in this country, California was the national capital of jaywalking enforcement.2021 January 13, Alan Ehrenhalt, “Jaywalking and the Dilemma of ‘Victimless’ Crimes”, in Governing, archived from the original on 04 Mar 2021

Also used as

jaywalking is also the present participle and gerund of jaywalk.

Origin of jaywalking

Back-formation from jaywalker. Analyzable as jaywalk + -ing, or jay (“a stupid person”) + walking.

From jaywalk + -ing.

Questions about jaywalking

What does jaywalking mean?
Jaywalking means an act of behaving as a jaywalker.
What part of speech is jaywalking?
Jaywalking is a noun.

Words near jaywalking in the dictionary

  1. Jayvion
  2. jaywalk
  3. jaywalked
  4. jaywalker
  5. jaywalkers
  6. jaywalking
  7. jaywalks
  8. Jaywick
  9. Jayzus
  10. jaz
  11. Jaza

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jaywalking (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.

Last updated:

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