claim jumper
1
9.9
- noun
- /kleɪm ˈdʒʌmpər/
- Archaic
:
usurpador
- After the gold rush, many claim jumpers illegally occupied land that didn't belong to them.
Examples
-
Over at another mine, fighting some claim-jumpers.
-
I'm not gonna tell an old claim jumper like you how to get to it.
-
And God should protect you from rustlers and claim jumpers, the dirty bastards.
-
He could be a lawman, she concluded, her mind racing, but it was just as likely that he was a gunslinger, a claim jumper, or a bounty hunter.
Fiction book (2000) -
Bluebank had been settled by claim-jumpers, independent prospectors, and bootleg miners whose midnight holes weakened the horizontal shafts of company mines.
Fiction book (1993) -
The claim jumper took over the abandoned mining site, ignoring the legal rights of the previous owner.
-
The local authorities arrested a claim jumper who was digging on private property without permission.
Synonyms
25
4.9
A person who goes onto someone else's land or into their building without permission
23
5.7
A person who lives in a house or on land without permission
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
claim + jumper
The phrase is partially compositional: it denotes a person who 'jumps' (takes) someone else's 'claim' (a legal right to land), so if a learner knows the specialized sense of 'claim' (land/rights) and reads 'jumper' as an agentive form, the meaning is derivable. However, an average B1 learner may only know 'claim' as a demand or 'jumper' as a sweater/piece of clothing (or not recognize the agentive use), so prior lexical knowledge or exposure is usually needed.
Etymology
The noun claim jumper comes from the gold rush, when a miner's piece of land was called a claim. A person who 'jumped' into that claim to take it was called a jumper, so the phrase came to mean 'someone who illegally takes another's land'.