Jacked

How to spell jacked

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce jacked

What does jacked mean?

1. verbRaised or hoisted using a jack or similar lifting device.
2. verbStole something, especially a vehicle or other property, in informal slang.
3. adjectiveExtremely muscular and physically built, in informal usage.
4. adjectiveBroken, damaged, or thrown into disorder, in informal usage.
5. verbIncreased a price or charge suddenly and steeply, usually followed by 'up'.

Jacked in a sentence

• verb

  He jacked the car up to change the wheel.

• verb

  Someone jacked his bike from outside the shop.

• adjective

  Months of heavy training left him completely jacked.

• adjective

  The printer is totally jacked and will not feed the paper.

• verb

  The airline jacked up its fares before the holiday rush.

• verb

  The mechanic jacked the vehicle and inspected the brakes.

Where does jacked come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'jack', which grew out of 'jack' the mechanical lifting device. That noun in turn comes from the man's name Jack, a familiar pet form of John that English speakers from the medieval period onward attached to all sorts of common tools and labouring objects, much as we still do with names like 'jenny' or 'jimmy'. Because Jack stood for the ordinary working man, his name was lent to the contraption that did heavy lifting in his place, and from the device came the verb meaning 'to raise with a jack'. From the literal idea of hoisting something up, twentieth-century slang stretched the word in several directions: prices being 'jacked up', a car being 'jacked' (stolen), a body being 'jacked' (heavily muscled), and a thing being 'jacked' (broken or ruined). The spelling stays simple and phonetic because it is a homely English formation rather than a borrowing, so the only thing to remember is the regular -ed ending.

How the word is built

• jack (to lift, or the lifting device, from the personal name Jack)
• -ed (past tense and participle suffix)