Find the word definition

Crossword clues for jerkwater

The Collaborative International Dictionary
jerkwater

jerkwater \jerkwater\ adj. [from jerk + water, a place where it is necessary to draw (jerk) water to supply the boiler of a steam engine.]

  1. small and remote and insignificant; as, a jerkwater college.

    Syn: one-horse, pokey, poky.

  2. (Railroads) Off the main railroad line. [Archaic]

Wiktionary
jerkwater

a. (context US colloquial pejorative English) Of an inhabited place, small, insignificant, and backward. n. (context US historical English) A train on a branch line.

WordNet
jerkwater

adj. small and remote and insignificant; "a jerkwater college"; "passed a series of poky little one-horse towns" [syn: one-horse, pokey, poky]

Usage examples of "jerkwater".

If you shut your eyes, you could believe you were back in the jungle on the outskirts of some little jerkwater town, smooth dusty under the trees on the leeward side of a grade that passed the watertank and cut off the wind, sitting around the small fire with a belly full of a good mulligan that you had been assigned the bumming of the carrots for, or maybe the onions, or the spuds.

It would be viewed as just another jerkwater story in the same league as reports of abominable snowmen and UFOS.

Last I heard you left the city desk and went to Florida to run some jerkwater newspaper, Tommy.

If a monk in a jerkwater town like the one they were married in knew that much, imagine what the ones here knew and could do!

There wasn't much to read apart from the fact that Trinavant was a big wheel in some jerkwater town in British Columbia.

A hopeless, jerkwater town where mustard is turned out in carload lots, in vats and tuns and barrels and pots and cute-looking little jars.

There's a little jerkwater town at the next crossroads where we turn.

Besides, even if I wanted something permanent with someone, which I don't want, but even if for some weird reason I did, I wouldn't want anything permanent with anyone here in this jerkwater town.

Still, the guy had started as a street punk in a jerkwater town on a backward world where pig farming was still a major activity, and he'd become, by guts, smarts, guile, and ruthlessness, one of the richest and most influential men in all the Realm.

But I was just a skinny kid growing up in Jenkin's Corner, a little jerkwater town west of Ft.

Still, the guy had started as a street punk in a jerkwater town on a backward world where pig farming was still a major activity, and he'd beĀ­.

If we can't keep control over this Cardassian tortoiseshell, we're just another semiautonomous jerkwater town with nothing to offer anybody at all.