Entry · catalog no. 4200
jackleg
/ /ˈdʒæk.lɛɡ/ /JAK-leg
noun · the South · 1820s
✓ Verified
1.
A person who practices a profession without qualification or credential, usually with a whiff of fraud about it. Most often said of preachers, but applied just as readily to lawyers, doctors, carpenters, and mechanics.
“That jackleg preacher had the church in debt inside a year.”
2.
As an adjective: makeshift, unlicensed, thrown together. A jackleg garage, a jackleg repair.
“He did a jackleg job on that roof and it leaked by Sunday.”
3.
In Black community usage recorded by John Langston Gwaltney: bogus — failing to meet the standards the community holds people to. Not merely unskilled, but not real right.
“He talks a good game, but the man is jackleg through and through.”
Origin & Attribution
Not a Black coinage, and the archive says so plainly: jackleg is a white Southern and South Midland Americanism of the 1820s, probably reworked from British blackleg, a crooked bookmaker. The earliest print found is the Herald of the Valley of Fincastle, Virginia, 20 May 1822, mocking "jacklegged Methodist preachers who came into the service of the Lord uncalled for." What Black speech did was take the word and keep it. From the 1930s forward the densest attestations are Black ones — Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine in 1934, the Baltimore Afro-American the same year, Dan Burley in the Amsterdam News, Gwaltney's Drylongso, Nathan McCall. The Black church made it a term of art, and the Black press carried it north. The word is Southern in origin and Black in custody.
1822
First print: Herald of the Valley, Fincastle, Virginia
1934
Hurston puts it in a preacher's mouth in Jonah's Gourd Vine
1980
Gwaltney records the Black community sense: bogus, not real right
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
the South · 1820s
Spoken by
Black Southern congregations and tradespeople; carried north by the Great Migration
$JACKLEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Enduring204 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
55/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1822
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@nolakid
New Orleans, LA
@htxdri
Houston, TX
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
Herald of the Valley (Fincastle, VA) — newspaper · 20 May 1822
researched
■
Jonah's Gourd Vine, Zora Neale Hurston — novel · 1934
book
■
Baltimore Afro-American — newspaper · 6 Oct 1934
researched
■
+ Cite a sourceDrylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America, John Langston Gwaltney — ethnography · 1980
book
See also