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jasper

nounverbnouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈd͡ʒæs.pə//
  • United Kingdom//ˈd͡ʒɑː.pə//
  • United States//ˈd͡ʒæs.pɚ//

An opaque, impure variety of quartz, of red, yellow, and other dull colors, breaking conchoidally with a smooth surface.

noun

  1. 1

    obsoleteAny bright-coloured kind of chalcedony apart from cornelian.

  2. 2

    An opaque, impure variety of quartz, of red, yellow, and other dull colors, breaking conchoidally with a smooth surface.

  3. 3

    Jasperware pottery.

Etymology

From Middle English jasper, jaspre, from Old French jaspre, a variant of jaspe (modern French jaspe), from Latin iaspis, from Ancient Greek ἴασπις (íaspis).

verb

  1. 1

    To decorate with, or as if with, jasper.

noun

  1. 1

    A wasp.

  2. 2

    slangA person, a guy, especially seen as naïve or simple.

    And list'nin to some big out-a-town jasper / Hearin' him tell about horse-race gamblin' / Not a wholesome trottin' race, no!

    "I stood there through almost an hour of it before they called Rooster Cogburn to the stand. I had guessed wrong as to which one he was, picking out a younger and slighter man with a badge on his shirt. And I was surprised when an old one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of Grover Cleveland went up and was sworn."

    Standing on the corner like a just-got-in-town jasper

    “That jasper,” sniggered Darby, “never pulled out his ‘dummy’ for nothing but pissing, I bet you!”

  3. 3

    A stranger.

Etymology

From the male personal name Jasper.

Forms

plural
jaspers
past tense
jaspered
past participle
jaspered
present participle
jaspering
third person singular
jaspers
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).