jostled

Verb

jostle (third-person singular simple present jostles, present participle jostling, simple past and past participle jostled)

1. (ambitransitive) To bump into or brush against while in motion; to push aside.
   • Besides, various are the paths to power and fame which by accident or choice men pursue, and though they jostle against each other, for men of the same profession are seldom friends, yet there is a much greater number of their fellow-creatures with whom they never clash. But women are very...1791 (date written), Mary Wollstonecraft, “Some Instances of the Folly which the Ignorance of Women Generates; with Concluding Reflections on the Moral Improvement that a Revolution in Female Manners...
2. (intransitive) To move through by pushing and shoving.
   • Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and watched.1920 April, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, “The egotist considers”, in This Side of Paradise, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, book I (The Romantic Egotist), page 119
3. (transitive) To be close to or in physical contact with.
   • […] the advantages of diversification of structure, with the accompanying differences of habit and constitution, determine that the inhabitants, which thus jostle each other most closely, shall, as a general rule, belong to what we call different genera and orders.1859 November 24, Charles Darwin, “Natural Selection”, in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, […], London: John Murray, […], →OCLC, page 114
4. (intransitive) To contend or vie in order to acquire something.
   • Dick, who, in serious earnest, was supposed to have considerable natural talents for his profession, and whose vain and sanguine disposition never permitted him to doubt for a moment of ultimate success, threw himself headlong into the crowd which jostled and struggled for notice and preferment.1819, Jedediah Cleishbotham [pseudonym; Walter Scott], chapter I, in Tales of My Landlord, Third Series. […], volume I (The Bride of Lammermoor), Edinburgh: […] [James Ballantyne and Co.] for...
5. (dated, slang) To pick or attempt to pick pockets.

See all 7 meanings of jostle