jacket
/ˈdʒakɪt
/noun
1An outer garment extending either to the waist or the hips, typically having sleeves and a fastening down the front: [as modifier]: he put his hand in his jacket pocket...
- Often featuring a snap front and drawstring waist, this jacket maybe lined or unlined.
- The popular lengths for jackets this fall are waist length, three-quarter length and trench coat length.
- I reached into the front pocket of my jacket and took out a small business card.
2An outer covering, especially one placed round a tank or pipe to insulate it.If you have a conventional water heater, give it a wrap as well with an insulated jacket that will help prevent energy loss....
- Bosch designed a thin inner liner of soft steel that sealed the gases in, its pressure load supported by a stout perforated steel jacket.
- Similarly, a steel and concrete jacket was secured to the swing span central pier in 1936.
2.1The dust jacket of a book.You may not have heard of House Industries, but you will undoubtedly have seen their work, be it on book jackets, CD covers or in the typography of advertising....
- A selection of books are on display with a summary of the story covering the book jacket.
- The atmosphere is literary, with the walls covered in huge posters of book jackets of American literary masterpieces.
2.2A record sleeve.While I gazed at walls decorated with faded record jackets, the owner enthralled me with his in-depth knowledge of this musical genre....
- Record jackets of all types lined the walls and memorabilia from the rock and roll era filled the many shelves all around the establishment.
- Nelly nodded looking over my shoulder at the titles on the jackets of the records.
3British The skin of a potato: potatoes cooked in their jackets...
- All we ate every day was a piece of black bread and three potatoes cooked in their jackets.
- What next, said the Herald, oranges with no peel, potatoes without jackets?
- New season potatoes, baked in their jackets and dressed ever so slightly with olive oil are the best possible accompaniment to properly cooked burgers and a green salad.
3.1 informal A jacket potato.The menu boasts everything from rump steaks to bangers and mash - and there are jackets and baguettes available too....
- I had a jacket with cheese and beans on Thursday and a cheese salad for lunch as well.
- We sat in the cafe and had a mundane lunch (a jacket with tuna - the tuna was more mayonnaise than anything and tasted like cement).
4US A folder or envelope containing an official document or file.
5A steel frame fixed to the seabed, forming the support structure of an oil production platform.
verb (jackets, jacketing, jacketed) [with object]
Cover with a jacket.While most bullets have been jacketed with copper-zinc alloy, a variety of other hard metals, including tungsten, have been used....
- For cladding-pumped laser experiments, some preforms have been jacketed with a second quartz glass tube in order to increase the cladding-core relation.
- Old stoves have been jacketed and furnaces put in. Artificial lighting systems have been installed.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French jaquet, diminutive of jaque (see jack2).
Jacket is from Old French jaquet, a diminutive of jaque, a word for a kind of tunic. The origin of the French word is uncertain, but it may have been identical with the common given name Jacques (a form of James— compare jack) and be associated with a garment worn by the common people. An alternative theory takes jaques de mailles, a tunic of chain mail, as the original form and links it via Spanish jaco to Arabic sakk ‘breastplate’.