jack-in-the-pulpit

Questions about jack-in-the-pulpit

What does jack-in-the-pulpit mean?

jack-in-the-pulpit means "common American spring-flowering woodland herb having sheathing leaves and an upright club-shaped spadix with overarching green and purple spathe producing scarlet berries". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in jack-in-the-pulpit?

jack-in-the-pulpit has 5 syllables and divides as jac-k-in--the--pul-pit under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for jack-in-the-pulpit?

Close synonyms include Indian turnip, wake-robin, Arisaema triphyllum, Arisaema atrorubens, cuckoopint. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is jack-in-the-pulpit a common word?

jack-in-the-pulpit 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.