rough and ready
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Meaning · English
Lacking refinement, but effective or serviceable
Literally: physically rough and hastily prepared
Where it’s used:
Used
Widespread English
Examples
Few of us would want cream distemper with rough and ready dark graining — except perhaps in a listed building or outside privy.
ROUGH and ready Trafford's Ukrainian import Oleg Sinkov struck three minutes from time to kill off any outside chances of Chelmsford winning the English League Conference B title.
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed on Wikipedia “Irreversible binomial” (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-29). Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.
Common questions
What does “rough and ready” mean?
Lacking refinement, but effective or serviceable Literally: physically rough and hastily prepared
Is “rough and ready” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.