jarhead

noun

jar·​head ˈjär-ˌhed 

slang

: marine sense 2

Examples of jarhead in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Many training scenes Boots are intense: jarheads screaming, tough guys roasting each other. —Nick Remsen, Vogue, 31 Oct. 2025

Mike Ferazzi lived to ride his motorcycle with his brothers, members of the Jarheads, a group of bikers comprised of, well, jarheads, Marines. —Kevin Cullen, BostonGlobe.com, 2 July 2019

When jarhead coders wrote their own version of Doom II, putting players in landscapes that resembled the Iraqi desert and other likely theaters of battle, Vaughn played it day and night. —Steve Silberman, WIRED, 1 Oct. 2002

Word History

Etymology

jar entry 1 + head entry 1

Note: According to a document on the website of the National Museum of the Marine Corps, the label jarhead "first appeared as early as World War II and referred to Marines' appearance wearing their dress blue uniforms. The high collar on the uniform and the Marines' head popping out of the top resembled a Mason Jar. Since World War II, the term has been applied more widely to Marine Corps recruits with their 'squared head' appearance because of the close-cropped haircuts." The word jarhead in reference to Marines can be documented earlier, however: it appears in the April, 1934 issue (p. 50) of The Leatherneck, a publication of the Marine Corps Institute. Peculiarly, in the May, 1933 issue (p. 38) of the same publication, the label refers to U.S. Army soldiers, not Marines: "Sergeants Kramer, Green and Carrick [Marines] sure gave the Army the run around on the USAT [U.S. Army Transport] Republic. Upon embarking they moved into the second class cabins, and it took three days and a squad of 'jarheads' to get them and their luggage moved to the troop class." In fact, jarhead has a long association with the U.S. Army due to the use of the word to refer to a mule (dating from no later than 1906) and the adoption of the mule in 1899 as a mascot of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Drawn from soldiers in western military posts, the West Coast Army football team, which competed against college teams such as Stanford in highly publicized games, was nicknamed the Jarheads, from at least 1926 to the dissolution of the team in 1933. It is unclear what motivated the transfer of jarhead from the Army to the Marines, but the Mason Jar and haircut explanations of the word were probably developed long after the fact. Note that jarhead has also occasionally been used as a derogatory epithet for a person considered dull or foolish; compare jughead in the same sense.

First Known Use

1934, in the meaning defined above

Rhymes for jarhead

• abed
• ahead
• beachhead
• bedspread
• bedstead
• behead
• blackhead
• blockhead
• bloodshed
• bowhead
• breastfed
• bridgehead