Word.ws English Dictionary

knee-jerking

knee-jerking noun: reacting instantaneously and without thought.

Noun

knee-jerking (uncountable)

  1. Reacting instantaneously and without thought.
    • How much of the positive response was liberal knee-jerking to be forgotten the next day?1974 April 6, Linda Thurston, “U.S. Civil Rights Conference―Heterosexuals Only”, in Gay Community News, page 5
    • I think it was Haidt who used Kahneman’s two systems view to say that we quickly rise to judgments based on unconscious gut reads and then “reason” to concoct or confabulate an after the fact justification for our “moral” kneejerking.2020 June 24, *Hemidactylus*, “absolute morality”, in talk.origins (Usenet)

Questions about knee-jerking

What does knee-jerking mean?
Knee-jerking means reacting instantaneously and without thought.
What part of speech is knee-jerking?
Knee-jerking is a noun.

Words near knee-jerking in the dictionary

  1. knee-highs
  2. knee-jerk
  3. knee-jerk reaction
  4. knee-jerk reactions
  5. knee-jerkery
  6. knee-jerking
  7. knee-jerkish
  8. knee-jerkishly
  9. knee-jerkism
  10. knee-jerks
  11. knee-jerky

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: knee-jerking (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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