jackanapes
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "jackanapes", 10-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "jackanapes" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "jackanapes" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
jackanapes is aEnglishnoun. It means: (A proper name for) an ape or monkey, especially a tame one kept for entertainment or as a pet. Pronounced /ˈd͡ʒækəneɪps/.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | jackanapes |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | /ˈd͡ʒækəneɪps/ |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for jackanapes is 10 letters long, classified as anoun, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈd͡ʒækəneɪps/. It sits outside the most-frequent rank tiers, which is often why uncommon words generate more spelling variants per reader.Wiktionary records 4 distinct senses for this headword, so context determines which meaning a reader should apply.
No frequent misspelling variants are recorded for jackanapes in our index, suggesting the orthography either follows predictable English patterns or the word is uncommon enough that typo corpora lack signal.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English iack napys, iac nape, iac napes (“derogatory nickname of the English military commander and statesman William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk (1396–1450)”), probably from Jacun or Jakin (“pet forms of the male name Jack”) + ape (“ape, mo… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is jackanapes, spelled J-A-C-K-A-N-A-P-E-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1(A proper name for) an ape or monkey, especially a tame one kept for entertainment or as a pet.
- 2(A proper name for) a person thought to behave like an ape or monkey, for example, in being impudent, mischievous, vain, etc.; specifically (chiefly humorous), an impudent or mischievous child.
- 3A crucifix.
- 4A small pulley which keeps a rope in line when lifting ore, water, etc., from a mine.
Etymology
From Middle English iack napys, iac nape, iac napes (“derogatory nickname of the English military commander and statesman William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk (1396–1450)”), probably from Jacun or Jakin (“pet forms of the male name Jack”) + ape (“ape, monkey”) + -s (possibly modelled after surnames such as Hobbes and Jakkes), referring to Suffolk’s heraldic badge which was an ape’s chain and clog (“weight such as a block of wood or log attached to an animal to hinder motion”) (see the image, right). It is uncertain whether the word was first coined as a nickname for Suffolk (the earliest known uses), or to refer to an ape or an ape-like person. If the word was originally a nickname, some early uses of etymology 1 sense 2.1 (“person thought to behave like an ape or monkey”) may allude to Suffolk who was widely regarded as an upstart, having risen from the merchant class. In later uses, the middle element of the word was often treated as the indefinite article a or an, that is, as if the word meant “Jack, an ape”.
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter J in our English index: