JOCKEY  , a professional rider of

race-horses, now the current usage (see HORSE-RACING) . The word is by origin a diminutive of " Jock," the Northern or Scots colloquial equivalent of the name " John " (cf . JACK) . A familiar instance of the use of the word as a name is in " Jockey of Norfolk " in Shakespeare's Richard III. v . 3, 304 . In the 16th and 17th centuries the word was applied to horse-dealers, postilions, itinerant minstrels and vagabonds, and thus frequently bore the meaning of a cunning trickster, a " sharp," whence " to jockey," to outwit, or " do " a person out of something . The current usage is found in John Evelyn's Diary, 1670, when it was clearly well known . George Borrow's attempt to derive the word from the gipsy chukni, a heavy whip used by horse-dealing gipsies, has no foundation .