Word.ws English Dictionary

spring-heeled Jacks

spring-heeled Jacks is the plural of spring-heeled Jack.

Meaning of spring-heeled Jack

Noun

spring-heeled Jack (plural spring-heeled Jacks)

  1. (historical) A terrifying man of bizarre appearance and able to make extraordinary leaps, the subject of English folklore of the Victorian era.
    • And he rattled, thumped, brandished his thunderbox, yelled, shouted, raved, roared, stamped, and danced corrobory like any black fellow; and then he touched a spring in the thunderbox, and out popped turnip-ghosts and magic-lanthorns and pasteboard bogies and spring-heeled Jacks and sallaballas […]1863, Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby

Questions about spring-heeled Jacks

What is spring-heeled Jacks the plural of?
Spring-heeled Jacks is the plural of spring-heeled Jack.

Words near spring-heeled Jacks in the dictionary

  1. spring-cleaners
  2. spring-cleaning
  3. spring-cleans
  4. spring-heeled
  5. Spring-heeled Jack
  6. spring-heeled Jacks
  7. spring-like
  8. spring-load
  9. spring-loaded
  10. spring-loaded camming device
  11. spring-loaded camming devices

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spring-heeled Jacks (page history and authors); spring-heeled Jack (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: “spring-heeled Jacks.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/spring-heeled_jacks. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.