jockey

Jockey started as a diminutive of Jock, the Northern English or Scots pet form of John, itself descending through French Jacques and Latin Iacobus back to the Hebrew name Yaʿaqov. Jock was used generically for 'boy' or 'fellow' at least since 1529, and adding -ey made it Jockey.

In the 1500s and 1600s, jockey referred broadly to horse-dealers, postilions, itinerant minstrels, and vagabonds — people on the road living by their wits — which gave rise to the sense of a cunning trickster and the verb 'to jockey' someone out of something. Only in 1670 did the word settle into its familiar meaning: a person who rides horses in races.

Jockey shares its root with Jack and Dick, other everyday names once used as generic terms for a common man.