Word.ws English Dictionary

jim-dandy

jim-dandy adjective: excellent, outstanding.

Adjective

jim-dandy

  1. (US, colloquial) Excellent, outstanding.
    • As its speed increased, and the black masses of chaparral went whizzing past on either side, the express messenger, lighting his pipe, looked through his window and remarked, feelingly: "What a jim-dandy place for a hold-up!"c. 1900, O. Henry, The Passing of Black Eagle
    • We could not wait for Atticus to come home for dinner, but called and said we had a big surprise for him. He seemed surprised when he saw most of the back yard in the front yard, but he said we had done a jim-dandy job. "I didn't know how you were going to do it," he said to Jem, "but from now on...1960 July 11, Harper Lee, chapter 8, in To Kill a Mockingbird, Philadelphia, Pa.; New York, N.Y.: J[oshua] B[allinger] Lippincott Company, →OCLC

Noun

jim-dandy (plural jim-dandies)

  1. (US, colloquial) Something that is a very superior example of its kind.
    • The tattered man stood musing.1895 October, Stephen Crane, chapter X, in The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War, New York, N.Y.: D[aniel] Appleton and Company, →OCLC, page 100

Forms of jim-dandy

Adjective
alternative formjimdandy
alternative formjim dandy
Noun
pluraljim-dandies

Origin of jim-dandy

Uncertain. Possibly a reference to the song Dandy Jim of Caroline (words by Silas Sexton Steel and music by J. Richard Myers), which was popular in the 1840s, around the time the term emerged. It was subsequently popularized by sports announcers in the late 1800s.

Questions about jim-dandy

What does jim-dandy mean?
Jim-dandy means excellent, outstanding.
What part of speech is jim-dandy?
Jim-dandy can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near jim-dandy in the dictionary

  1. Jim Thorpe
  2. jim up
  3. Jim Wells County
  4. Jim-Bob
  5. jim-dandies
  6. jim-dandy
  7. jim-jam
  8. jim-jams
  9. jim-swinger
  10. jim-swingers
  11. jimador

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jim-dandy (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: En-au-jimdandy.ogg.

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