Other forms: jawbreakers
A jawbreaker is a big, hard, round piece of candy. You can often tell when a little kid is sucking on a jawbreaker from the bulge in her cheek.
In North America, the word jawbreaker usually refers to a very sweet kind of candy that can't be bitten because it's so hard. Another kind of jawbreaker is a word that's difficult to pronounce. Words like remuneration and mnemonics are considered jawbreakers by many people, including native English speakers. The adjective jawbreakingly came first, around 1824, describing tricky words, and the candy emerged in 1911. Both versions of jawbreaker use the figurative sense of "breaking" one's jaw, either with language or hard candy.