Definition of Jackknife
Jackknife
jack·knife
Definition/Meaning
(noun)
a large strong knife with a folding blade;
e.g. A jackknife is a versatile tool used for anything from opening an envelope, to self-defense.
(noun)
a dive with the body first curved at the waist before straightening;
e.g. You perform a jackknife dive by jumping up, bending forward from your waist, and then straightening your body just before you hit the water.
(verb)
to move one's body to form an angle of 90 degrees or into doubled-up position;
e.g. He quickly jackknifed into a sitting position on the floor.
(verb)
an articulated vehicle, a vehicle with a permanent or semi-permanent pivot joint in its construction, bending into a V-shape in an uncontrolled skidding movement;
e.g. The semi-truck jackknifed on the curvy road after it made a sharp turn, causing the trailer behind it to lose balance, going in the opposite and folding inwards.
(noun)
a process of evaluating the variability of data by imitating a calculation on the sets of data collected by eliminating one power from the total set;
e.g. The jackknife estimator is useful for variance and bias estimation in statistics.
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