Word.ws English Dictionary

jerk water

jerk water verb: to fill a steam locomotive water tank manually from natural water supplies (a hypothetical process whose use has been discredited).

Verb

jerk water (third-person singular simple present jerks water, present participle jerking water, simple past and past participle jerked water)

  1. (US, apocryphal) To fill a steam locomotive water tank manually from natural water supplies (a hypothetical process whose use has been discredited).
    • The Santa Fe, called the Jerk Water route because they "jerked" water from ponds and wallows for the engine, still frayed out at the Kansas line.1954, Mari Sandoz, The Buffalo Hunters: The Story of the Hide Men, page 171
    • […] by bailing from near streams with buckets, (the brake-man called this operation jerking water) and from this the road gets its name of jerkwater road.1975 Mar, Indiana Historical Society, Indiana Magazine of History, volume 71, number 1, page 355
  2. (US, dated) To scoop water from a track pan mounted on the tracks directly into a steam engine's tank without stopping.
    • In 1870 at Montrose, N.Y., the New York Central made the first installation of a track pan and scoop to permit locomotives to take water on the fly. Since these installations invariably were in tiny communities, and since they permitted locomotives literally to “jerk water”1979, The Train Dispatcher - Volumes 61-62, page 49
    • The early, crude "jerk water" device applied by the New York Central is shown in figure 8.24.2001, Anthony J. Bianculli, Trains and Technology: Track and structures, page 19610

Adjective

jerk water (comparative more jerk water, superlative most jerk water)

  1. (US, colloquial, derogatory) Of inhabited places, small, insignificant, isolated, backwards
    • But any way from the number of jerk water burgs we went through you would think we was on the Monon and the towns all looks so much like the other that […].c. 1920, Ring Lardner, The Real Dope

Forms of jerk water

Verb
third-person singular presentjerks water
present participlejerking water
past participlejerked water
pastjerked water
Adjective
comparativemore jerk water
superlativemost jerk water

Words formed from jerk water

Questions about jerk water

What does jerk water mean?
Jerk water means to fill a steam locomotive water tank manually from natural water supplies (a hypothetical process whose use has been discredited).
What part of speech is jerk water?
Jerk water can be a verb or an adjective.
What is the past tense of jerk water?
The past tense of jerk water is jerked water.

Words near jerk water in the dictionary

  1. jerk one out
  2. jerk over
  3. jerk someone's chain
  4. jerk the gherkin
  5. jerk up
  6. jerk water
  7. jerk-ass
  8. jerk-asses
  9. jerk-off
  10. jerk-offs
  11. jerk-water

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jerk water (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: “jerk water.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/jerk_water. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.