cheek by jowl

• cheek-by-jowl, cheek to jowl, cheek-to-jowl

cheek by jowl

1. In very close physical proximity, crowded together.
   • 2008, Kitty Crockett Robertson, Measuring Time - By an Hourglass, page 140:

     We shared the long hours, the often rough seas, the successes and the disappointments in a close companionship with the captains and crews of the Italian boats and also with the little clique of fishermen whose small draggers were moored cheek by jowl with us in Annisquam Harbor.

   • 1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 17, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book II, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC:

     Wee see Merchants, countrey-Justices, and Artificers to march cheeke by joll with our Nobilitie, in valour, and militarie discipline.

   • 2012 April 8, Helen Pidd, The Guardian:

     he had made his peace with the idea of spending half-term cheek-by-jowl on a cruise ship with the world's biggest Titanic enthusiasts.

2. (by extension) In very close or intimate association.
   • 1929, Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own‎:

     By so doing you will certainly profit the art of fiction. For books have a way of influencing each other. Fiction will be much the better for standing cheek by jowl with poetry and philosophy.

   • 2009, John Fabian Witt, Patriots and Cosmopolitans: Hidden Histories of American Law:

     Exit and voice, social theorist Albert O. Hirschman's famous dichotomous strategies, collided in the South Carolina countryside, where renewed commitment to the nation existed cheek by jowl with exit from it.

cheek by jowl (comparative more cheek by jowl, superlative most cheek by jowl)

1. Tightly packed.
   • 2010, Manorama Mathai, Love and Dr. Aiyar, page 121:

     Books on etymology lay among Tamil poetry and volumes on religion were cheek by jowl with science fiction.

   • 2012, Roger Lovegrove, Islands Beyond the Horizon, page 62:

     The universal bohios (palm-leaved, thatched huts) are cheek by jowl with each other, right to the water's edge where they are often linked to each other by narrow planks across inlets and creeks.

   • 2014, J.B. Bullen, Writing and Victorianism, page 54:

     For the magazine format, bringing together as it does a range of authors, topics and kinds of article into a single but serialized text, offers to twentieth-century readers a cheek by jowl structure which alerts us to the nuances of difference — categories of gender, genre, class, ideology, discourse — which allegedly more seamless texts are claimed to repress.

   • 2014, Marlo Thomas, It Ain't Over . . . Till It's Over, page 306:

     It was sprinkled with houses, some dilapidated, some newer, some cheek by jowl, others sitting on wide parcels of land.

• The similar expression cheek to cheek implies a cozy, romantic situation, while cheek by jowl implies rather the opposite, being cramped or crowded.
• cheek by jowl is chiefly British, while cheek to jowl is chiefly American usage.
• The adverb is usually written in the unhyphenated version, while the adjective is usually hyphenated.

• chockablock