English

Alternative forms

• cheap-jack

Noun

cheapjack ‎(plural cheapjacks)

1. A peddler, a travelling hawker.
   • 1871–72, George Eliot, Middlemarch, Chapter 6

     "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 2007, p. 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.

Adjective

cheapjack ‎(comparative more cheapjack, superlative most cheapjack)

1. shabby
   • 1988, Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library, Penguin Books (1988), 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.