Jerky

How to spell jerky

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce jerky

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does jerky mean?

1. nounStrips of lean meat that have been seasoned and dried to preserve them.
2. adjectiveMoving with sudden, sharp, uneven motions rather than smoothly.

Jerky in a sentence

• noun

  She packed beef jerky for the long mountain hike.

• adjective

  The old bus gave a jerky ride down the cobbled street.

• noun

  The gas station sold strips of peppered jerky near the till.

• adjective

  The cheap webcam produced a jerky video feed during the call.

Where does jerky come from?

Language of origin: Other

The two meanings of jerky reach English by very different paths that happen to land on the same spelling. The dried-meat noun comes from the Quechua word ch'arki, meaning strips of dried, salted flesh, which passed into Spanish as charqui and reached English in the 1600s as travellers described preserved meat from the Americas. English speakers gradually reshaped the unfamiliar charqui until it looked like a homely English word ending in -y, which is why the spelling no longer hints at its South American root. The adjective jerky, meaning moving in sudden sharp bursts, is unrelated: it is simply the noun jerk (a quick, sharp pull or twitch, of uncertain and probably imitative origin) plus the adjective ending -y. Because both senses settled on the same tidy four-letter base plus -y, the spelling itself is straightforward even though the histories diverge.

How the word is built

• Two routes share one spelling: the meat sense reshapes Quechua/Spanish charqui (dried meat) to look English; the movement sense is jerk (a sudden sharp pull)
• -y (adjective suffix)