Word.ws English Dictionary

jimjam

jimjam noun: placeholder word for a thing or person nonspecific, unknown or forgotten; thingamabob. Also the attributive form of jimjams.

Noun

jimjam (countable and uncountable, plural jimjams)

  1. Placeholder word for a thing or person nonspecific, unknown or forgotten; thingamabob.
    • Ye should have done well to shew us with which foot the pope did set on the crown upon Henry's head, the right or the left, standing, sitting, leaning, or lying, barefooted and using the help of his great toe or shod, whether he had some jimjam made for him to take it up, hold it, and put it on...1848, John Jewel (Richard William Jelf, ed), The works of John Jewel, D.D., Bishop of Salisbury
    • Where the jimjam sits on the thingumbob tree, And he sweetly sings to the jigamarec.1873, The Lakeside Monthly - Volumes 10-11, page 164
  2. Nonsense; rigmarole.
    • A feller that sees a lot o' jimjam visions ahead never will buck down to real life here, an' he'll never lay up a dollar or own a foot of land.1912, Will Nathaniel Harben, Paul Rundel: A Novel, page 328
    • The Mexican trouble is about one fifth genuine complication and four fifths journalistic jimjam.1913, The Bellman - Volume 15, page 613
  3. Chaotic activity; uproar; craziness.
    • The whole town's in a positive jimjam.2006, Stephen Wright, The Amalgamation Polka, page 167

Adjective

jimjam (not comparable)

  1. Crazy; insane or befuddled.
    • Insurancewise, the papers tell of a new hat-passer started in Chicago to demonstrate that Dr. Keeley's "cured" jimjam patients, whom regular companies look askance at, are as safe risks as sober men ;1891, Travelers' Record - Volumes 27-34, page 8
    • It was just a crazy jimjam lark, concocted by a fuddled brain, but it might have had most serious consequences for the innocent clerk.1920, Benjamin Lillard, Practical Druggist and Pharmaceutical Review of Reviews

Verb

jimjam (third-person singular simple present jimjams, present participle jimjamming, simple past and past participle jimjammed)

  1. To cram together in a jumbled fashion.
    • And because of the jumbled layout of the city—old prefabs mingling with equally utilitarian new construction and makeshift hovels jimjammed in every which way—an agile person who could jump as well as she could would be able to travel a good distance going from roof to roof.2015, Teresa Noelle Roberts, Bad Kitty, →ISBN
  2. To befuddle or stupefy.
    • I mean my nerves were totally jimjammed ... I was up shit creek, gents!2000, Jáchym Topol, Alex Zucker, City, sister, silver, page 114
    • "He's jimjammed on acid, man," JoJo said. "Bad trippin'. Musta got dosed."2003, Denis Hamill, Long Time Gone: A Novel, →ISBN, page 277
  3. To dance ecstatically.
    • Lights blazed down, but not too strongly, so that the dancers could drift along or jimjam in ecstatic rhythm, in a simulacrum of private worlds.2011, Kenneth Bulmer, On the Symb-Socket Circuit, →ISBN
    • They would jimjam and jitterbug flirtatiously up and around the bump in his lower nape and behind the ridge of his ear for a minute or two, and then as if yanked up and away by some resentful mother spider disappear until the next day or the day after when they would dance just a little bit longer...2015, Ernesto Mestre, The Lazarus Rumba: A Novel, →ISBN, page 1
  4. (euphemistic) To copulate.
    • It didn't work until she spiked his orange juice with a triple dose of street acid: she sent three different girls up that day, and he fucked, sucked, and orifically jimjammed his little brains loose.2007, Jonathan Lethem, Tom Perrotta, Lester Bangs, Lit Riffs, →ISBN, page 37

Also used as

jimjam is also the attributive form of jimjams.

Examples of jimjam in a sentence

  • We can eat in the kitchen, like we used to before you got old enough to ply the lads an' do all that mall jimjam with your pals.2013, P. D. Skelton, Renascence: A Story of Christianity in an Atheistic Future, →ISBN, page 37:
  • Shiver me sails an' rot me timbers, fry me barnacles, scrape me keel, an' all that nautical jimjam.2004, Brian Jacques, Loamhedge: A Novel of Redwall, →ISBN:

Forms of jimjam

Noun
pluraljimjams
Verb
third-person singular presentjimjams
present participlejimjamming
past participlejimjammed
pastjimjammed

Questions about jimjam

What does jimjam mean?
Jimjam means placeholder word for a thing or person nonspecific, unknown or forgotten; thingamabob.
How do you use jimjam in a sentence?
We can eat in the kitchen, like we used to before you got old enough to ply the lads an' do all that mall jimjam with your pals.
What part of speech is jimjam?
Jimjam can be a noun, an adjective or a verb.
What is the plural of jimjam?
The plural of jimjam is jimjams.

Words near jimjam in the dictionary

  1. Jiminy Christmas
  2. jiminy cricket
  3. jiminy crickets
  4. Jimison
  5. Jimisons
  6. jimjam
  7. jimjammed
  8. jimjamming
  9. jimjams
  10. jimjilbang
  11. jimjilbangs

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: jimjam (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-jimjam.wav.

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