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jackass

nounverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//ˈd͡ʒækæs//

A male donkey.

noun

  1. 1

    A male donkey.

  2. 2

    A foolish or stupid person.

  3. 3

    An inappropriately rude or obnoxious person.

    Bobby, only jackasses go around saying how much money they make.

  4. 4

    slangA kind of bootleg liquor.

    As the vintner Louis Foppiano recalled years later, Sonoma County during Prohibition became a center for bootlegging, not of wine, but of spirits. 'There were some big stills hidden up in the hills of Sonoma, some producing five hundred gallons of Jackass [spirits made from spring water and sugar] a day.'

    By now the wine counties were rife with the activity of the illegal wine trade and the force of the Prohibition Unit was hustling to keep up. At the start of the year, Officer William Navas had staged a raid on the dining room at Healdsburg's Hotel Sotoyome and discovered 'jackass' brandy […]

  5. 5

    obsoleteThe laughing kookaburra.

Etymology

Etymology tree English jack Proto-Indo-European *h₁órs-o-s Proto-Germanic *arsaz Proto-West Germanic *ars Old English ears Middle English ars English ass English jackass From jack + ass.

verb

  1. 1

    rareTo behave very obnoxiously.

noun

  1. 1

    slangA jack and an ace as a starting hand in Texas hold 'em.

Etymology

From the phonetic similarity of "jack, ace" to "jackass".

Forms

plural
jackasses
past tense
jackassed
past participle
jackassed
present participle
jackassing
third person singular
jackasses
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).