Word of the Day

: July 22, 2025

jettison

verb JET-uh-sun

What It Means

When you jettison something, you get rid of it either because it is not needed or because it is impeding your progress or otherwise weighing you down.

// Now that the purchase of the building has been finalized, we'll revamp what we want to keep and jettison the rest.

// The approach of the storm forced them to jettison their vacation plans.

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jettison in Context

“A 2017 study found that participants who wrote a to-do list before bed instead of journaling about their accomplishments fell asleep ‘significantly faster.’ … ‘The more specifically participants wrote their to-do list, the faster they subsequently fell asleep, whereas the opposite trend was observed when participants wrote about completed activities,’ the study authors wrote in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. They speculated that writing down tasks lets you jettison your worries, so you don’t need to think about them while trying to sleep.” — Tracy Swartz, The New York Post, 20 Jan. 2025

Did You Know?

Jettison comes from the Anglo-French noun geteson (literally “action of throwing”), and ultimately from the Latin verb jactare, meaning “to throw.” The noun jettison refers to a voluntary sacrifice of cargo to lighten a ship’s load in time of distress, and is the source of the word jetsam, the word for goods that are so jettisoned; that word is often paired with flotsam (“floating wreckage”). These days you don’t have to be on a sinking ship to jettison something: the verb also means simply “to get rid of.”