jack-in-a-box
- a variation of jack-in-the-box.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Over to the right, that jack-in-a-box ghost keeps reemerging from the big fat pumpkin, as if on a loop.
From Los Angeles Times ● Sep. 23, 2016
How it constitutes good manners to underline the call of nature by hopping up and down like a jack-in-a-box I fail to understand.
From Slate ● Mar. 20, 2014
Not that it does him any good; Diana rebounds like a jack-in-a-box.
From Time ● Feb. 7, 2013
Suddenly, like a jack-in-a-box, a lieutenant from the Dorsets popped up from the cellar of a municipal building that had been requisitioned for a headquarters.
From "Atonement" by Ian McEwan
Time would lose its abstracted character, if we kept it like a curiosity or a jack-in-a-box: its prophetic warnings would have no effect, if it obviously spoke only at our prompting, like a paltry ventriloquism.
From A Century of English Essays An Anthology Ranging from Caxton to R. L. Stevenson & the Writers of Our Own Time by Rhys, Ernest
