cheapjack

English

Alternative forms

• cheap-jack

Etymology

From cheap +‎ Jack.

Noun

cheapjack (plural cheapjacks)

1. A peddler, a travelling hawker.

   Synonyms: chapman (cognate), cheap John

   • 1871, George Eliot [pseudonym; Mary Ann Evans], chapter VI, in Middlemarch […], volume I, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, →OCLC, book I, page 93:

     "Why," rejoined Mrs Cadwallader, with a sharper note, "you don't mean to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way—making a sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?"

   • 1974, GB Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, New York, published 2007, page 43:

     My mother and father was standing against the railings by the market, looking over at the fire-swallower and the cheap-jack and the Salvation Army down below; and the German Band was playing round the corner of the Commercial Arcade.

   • 1999, Mike Mitchell, translating HJC von Grimmelshausen, Simplicissimus, IV.8, Dedalus 2016, p. 303:

     I was much too timid and didn't have the cheap-jack’s boasting patter.

Adjective

cheapjack (comparative more cheapjack, superlative most cheapjack)

1. shabby
   • 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, paperback edition, London: Penguin Books, →ISBN, page 276:

     It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstruous edifice.