Word.ws English Dictionary

bare bones

bare bones noun: the essential elements of something; the minimum viable set of elements; especially when they are described without going into detail.

Noun

bare bones pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) The essential elements of something; the minimum viable set of elements; especially when they are described without going into detail.
    • He had only been taught the bare bones of the system, but carried on regardless.
    • The bare bones of a cookbook are its recipes, but as a genre it is so elastic and malleable that it can contain a range of other purposes and dimensions.1982 April 10, Michael Bronski, “We Are How We Cook”, in Gay Community News, page 7

Origin of bare bones

By metaphor with the skeleton versus the whole body including the flesh.

Questions about bare bones

What does bare bones mean?
Bare bones means the essential elements of something; the minimum viable set of elements; especially when they are described without going into detail.
What part of speech is bare bones?
Bare bones is a noun.

Words near bare bones in the dictionary

  1. bare beater
  2. bare beaters
  3. bare beating
  4. bare board
  5. bare boards
  6. bare bones
  7. bare essentials
  8. bare hand
  9. bare handed
  10. bare handing
  11. bare hands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bare bones (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “bare bones.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/bare_bones. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.