jaw-dropping

English

WOTD – 20 June 2020

Etymology

A reference to a person’s mouth open wide in amazement or shock.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈd͡ʒɔː ˌdɹɒpɪŋ/

• Audio (Southern England):

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• (General American) enPR: jô drŏpʹĭng, IPA^(key): /ˈd͡ʒɔ ˌdɹɑpɪŋ/
• Hyphenation: jaw-drop‧ping

Adjective

jaw-dropping (comparative more jaw-dropping, superlative most jaw-dropping)

1. (informal) Causing great awe or surprise.
   • 1998 September 23, Tom De Haven, “Stephen King, Bag of Bones [book review]”, in Entertainment Weekly‎^[1], New York, N.Y.: Entertainment Weekly, Inc., →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 24 October 2015:

     Bag of Bones is, hands down, [Stephen] King's most narratively subversive fiction. Whenever you're positive–just positive!–you know where this ghost story is heading, that's exactly when it gallops off in some jaw-dropping new direction.

   • 1999, Tobias Hurwitz, “Pre-punk”, in Punk Guitar Styles: The Guitarist’s Guide to Music of the Masters (National Guitar Workshop Book), Van Nuys, Calif.: Alfred Publishing, →ISBN, page 12:

     [Iggy] Pop's was the most jaw-dropping stage show anywhere. He made a point of bloodying himself with broken glass at virtually all of his shows.

   • 2006, Adam-Troy Castro, “The Most Jaw-dropping Errors Ever Made by Racers”, in “My Ox is Broken!”: Roadblocks, Detours, Fast Forwards, and Other Great Moments from TV’s The Amazing Race, Dallax, Tex.: BenBella Books, →ISBN, page 402:

     But they discover their error in the cab, tell their driver to turn around, talk themselves out of that, tell their driver to stop, talk themselves out of that, and finally—displaying a truly jaw-dropping grasp of logic, even for lawyers—decide the clue means that taking the cab there is okay as long as they then walk to the mat on their own two feet.

   • 2018 July 25, A. A. Dowd, “Fallout may be the Most Breathlessly Intense Mission: Impossible Adventure Yet”, in The A.V. Club‎^[2], archived from the original on 31 July 2018:

     The plots of Mission: Impossible movies tend to be convoluted but negligible, really only there to provide connective tissue between jaw-dropping set pieces.

Alternative forms

• jawdropping

Derived terms

• jaw-droppingly

Related terms

• make someone's jaw drop
• someone's jaw dropped
• wide-eyed

Translations

causing great awe or surprise

• Dutch: adembenemend (nl), verbazingwekkend (nl), verbluffend (nl)
• Finnish: ällistyttävä (fi), leuat loksauttava
• French: à couper le souffle (fr)
• German: atemberaubend (de), umwerfend (de), unglaublich (de)
• Hungarian: elképesztő (hu), döbbenetes (hu), bámulatba ejtő
• Japanese: 顎が落ちる (ago ga ichiru)
• Polish: zadziwiający (pl), zaskakujący (pl)
• Serbo-Croatian: da objesiš vilicu (idiom), zaprepašćujuće n
• Turkish: dudak uçuklatan, ağzı açık bırakan

Further reading

• “jaw-dropping, adj.” under “jaw, n.¹”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1900.
• “jaw-dropping, adj.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.