Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The game played with jackstraws{2}, which resembles pick-up-sticks.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Plural form of jackstraw.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a game in which players try to pick each jackstraw (or spillikin) off of a pile without moving any of the others

Etymologies

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Examples

  • This open ground beneath the trees made walking anywhere easy in contrast to eastern forests with their thick bushy undergrowth and giant jackstraws deadfalls.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • This open ground beneath the trees made walking anywhere easy in contrast to eastern forests with their thick bushy undergrowth and giant jackstraws deadfalls.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • This open ground beneath the trees made walking anywhere easy in contrast to eastern forests with their thick bushy undergrowth and giant jackstraws deadfalls.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • This open ground beneath the trees made walking anywhere easy in contrast to eastern forests with their thick bushy undergrowth and giant jackstraws deadfalls.

    Bird Cloud Annie Proulx 2011

  • He pointed to the timbers, some of which had been scattered like jackstraws.

    Bridge of the Separator Turtledove, Harry 2005

  • There was virtually nothing left inside, though the chimney stack still stood, and jagged bits of the walls remained, their logs fallen like jackstraws.

    A Breath of Snow and Ashes Gabaldon, Diana 2005

  • The other men had come and hastily put a roof on, but the cabin as a whole reminded Roger of nothing so much as a pile of giant jackstraws, poised precariously on the side of the mountain and obviously only awaiting the next spring flood to slide down the mountain after its builder.

    A Breath of Snow and Ashes Gabaldon, Diana 2005

  • I surged to my feet, clambered on top of the rock, and began to mow down the trees ahead of him, blasting the trunks near the base so they dropped like jackstraws.

    Sagittarius Whorl May, Julian 2001

  • Tree trunks, ten, twenty, a hundred feet long, were scattered like jackstraws, crisscrossing each other in ragged confusion.

    Firestorm Barr, Nevada 1996

  • I had seen human remains treated with far less reverence; the skulls of early Christian martyrs jammed cheek by bony jowl together in heaps in the catacombs, thigh bones tossed in a pile like jackstraws underneath.

    Dragonfly in Amber Gabaldon, Diana 1992

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