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jenny

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • //ˈd͡ʒɛni//

A device for spinning thread from fiber onto multiple spindles (also called spinning jenny).

noun

  1. 1

    A device for spinning thread from fiber onto multiple spindles (also called spinning jenny).

  2. 2

    A female creature of certain kinds: A female donkey.

  3. 3

    A female creature of certain kinds: A female wren.

  4. 4

    A female creature of certain kinds: A female cat.

    Of course all the stock went by road and the house cat—a jenny it was—was put into a basket and driven in the trap along with one or two particular things and the women.

  5. 5

    A female creature of certain kinds: A female crab.

  6. 6

    A catmill.

  7. 7

    In billiards and similar games, a powerful follow shot with plenty of topspin.

    Cream's potting had been extraordinary, extraordinary, I remember, said Goff. I never saw anything like it. We were watching breathless, as he set himself for a long thin jenny, with the black of all balls.

Etymology

Partially from generic use of the female given name Jenny (cf. Jane) and partially from informal pronunciations of engine.

verb

  1. 1

    To wind finished lace onto cards ready for sale.

Forms

plural
jennies
past tense
jennied
past participle
jennied
present participle
jennying
third person singular
jennies
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).