- 1
If you are jumpy, you feel nervous, as if something bad might happen any second. Your body stays on watch. A sudden sound can make you start. People say it about someone waiting for news, walking home late, or after too much coffee. It is informal — friends say it, not a doctor's notes. The feeling is in the body as much as in the mind: you look ready to jump. Though actually, jumpy can also describe a thing that keeps making sudden little moves — a jumpy film cuts too fast; a jumpy picture on a screen. The nervous meaning grew from that body picture.
緊張不安、一驚一乍
組成jump + -y. The -y (from older English -y / -ig) means “full of” or “like”: jumpy is “full of jumping,” which then came to mean “ready to jump because you are nervous.”
原始詞典資料2 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
jumpyadj/ˈd͡ʒʌmpi/
- 1
Nervous and excited.
- It was the butler who saw him go. Twelve o'clock at night and raining hard. So next night I was up at the house and, sure enough, master was off again. Stephens and I went after him, but it was jumpy work, for it would have been a bad job if he had seen us.
- "I wish it was well over," admitted Hollyer. "I'm not particularly jumpy, but this gives me a touch of the creeps."
- 2
Tending to jump; full of jumps.
- Near-synonym: saltatory
- We moved at a good clip, so I reached up to pull shut the window coverings, just in case this jumpy frog decided to escape.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。