cheek by jowl

1. 1.

   in close proximity

   “the houses were jumbled together cheek by jowl”

Questions about cheek by jowl

What does cheek by jowl mean?

cheek by jowl means "in close proximity".

Is cheek by jowl a common word?

cheek by jowl is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.