jerry-built

Use Jerry-built in a sentence

adjective

built cheaply and flimsily.

contrived or developed in a haphazard, unsubstantial fashion, as a project or organization.

Origin:
1865–70; jerry (as in jerry-build) + built

Can be confused: jerry-built, jury-rigged.

Synonyms
1. ramshackle, rickety, shoddy, slipshod.

Dictionary.com Unabridged

verb (used with object), jer·ry-built, jer·ry-build·ing.

to build cheaply and flimsily.

Origin:
1880–85; back formation from jerry-builder. See jerry², build

Related forms

jer·ry-build·er, noun

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2013.
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Link To jerry-built

00:10

Jerry-built is always a great word to know.

So is zedonk. Does it mean:

a screen or mat covered with a dark material for shielding a camera lens from excess light or glare.

the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

jerry-build

—vb , -builds, -building, -built
	(tr) to build (houses, flats, etc) badly using cheap materials

'jerry-builder

—n

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
2009 © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009
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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

jerry-built

1869, Eng. dial. jerry "bad, defective," a pejorative use of the male nickname Jerry (a popular form of Jeremy), or from naut. slang jury "temporary," which came to be used of all sorts of makeshift and inferior objects (see jury (adj.)).

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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Slang Dictionary

jerry-built definition

mod.
carelessly and awkwardly built. : The lawyer's case was jerry-built, but the jury bought it anyway.

Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions by Richard A. Spears.Fourth Edition.
Copyright 2007. Published by McGraw Hill.
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Example sentences

For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that

slides straight to the bottom at its christening.

But there's a jerry-built climax and a prolonged, tiresome post-climax.

The tenants on the upper floors jerry-built kitchens, gardens, even bathrooms

on the rooftops.

It drives the specious, the jerry-built the actively hurtful from the market.

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Related Words

jerry jury-rig

jury-rig

Matching Quote

"The child receives data through the sense organs; the child also has some inborn processing capacities—otherwise it would not be able to learn—but in addition, some "information" or "programs" are built-in at birth (for example, the child does not have to learn how to suck, for this is an innate reflex); there is a working memory, in which the child keeps those items of knowledge that are being used at a particular moment; and there is a permanent memory, which is, in Locke's terms, largely a "blank tablet" at birth, but which has a storage capacity that makes a hard disk pale into insignificance. The child gradually builds up a symbolic representation of the world around it, so there must be some inner "language" or medium of representation; even a newborn baby is starting to see and taste and smell and hear and touch, and to remember the more striking of its experiences, so the internal medium by which it represents and stores these impressions cannot be the native language (of which it is still ignorant. Jerry Fodor [in The Language of Thought] has discussed this inbuilt "language of thought," which is similar conceptually to the "machine language" that is built into the personal computer and about which most users remain completely ignorant)."

-John Cleverley

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