Dictionary.com
Thesaurus.com
Synonyms

jackhammer

American  
[jak-ham-er] / ˈdʒækˌhæm ər /

noun

  • jackhammers
    plural
  1. a portable drill operated by compressed air and used to drill rock, break up pavement, etc.


jackhammer British  
/ ˈdʒækˌhæmə /

noun

  1. a hand-held hammer drill, driven by compressed air, for drilling rocks, etc

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

Etymology

Origin of jackhammer

An Americanism dating back to 1925–30; jack 1 + hammer

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.

See Examples For:

But he turns up the volume on his rich voice so high, and so consistently, that Shakespeare’s verse comes across like the sound of a jackhammer without an off switch.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Feb. 14, 2026

In the end, Guadagnino takes a jackhammer to everything he’s spent the last two-plus hours so meticulously building, but not quite in the way one might expect.

From Salon ● Sep. 25, 2025

Let’s say you’re out on some rugged outcropping and you need to jump on your jackhammer for a few minutes.

From Slate ● Jul. 18, 2024

“After the curbs were perfectly poured, we had a gentleman with a jackhammer come in here and chip away at them,” said Gary Ehrlich, president of studio operations.

From Los Angeles Times ● May 17, 2024

For a long while conversation was impossible, because I was bouncing up and down on the seat like a jackhammer.

From "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer

The roar of bulldozers and jackhammers drilling into piles of debris is almost constant.

From BBC ● Apr. 10, 2025

Led by Luis Chiappe, director of the Natural History Museum’s Dinosaur Institute, the paleontologists return with generators and tents and jackhammers and dental picks.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 15, 2024

The technician positioned me to slide through the metal arc of an MRI machine while the sound of jackhammers pounded.

From Salon ● Sep. 30, 2024

Unlike the nanoscale drills based on Nobel laureate Bernard Feringa's molecular motors, molecular jackhammers employ an entirely different - and unprecedented - mechanism of action.

From Science Daily ● Dec. 19, 2023

So hard that roughly two thousand feet of steel disappeared every day from the bit ends of all the jackhammers and pneumatic drills at work in the canyon.

From "The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics" by Daniel James Brown

Vocabulary.com logo
by dictionary.com

Just like flashcards, but way more fun

Don't take our word for it. Leave the boring studying behind and join VocabTrainer today. You'll learn even faster and never look back.

Take me to Vocabulary.com