Word.ws English Dictionary

hackish

hackish adjective: characteristic of hacks, or inferior writers.

Adjective

hackish (comparative more hackish, superlative most hackish)

  1. Characteristic of hacks, or inferior writers.
  2. (informal) Using, or characterised by, hacks: poorly designed workarounds.
    • Our site, ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix, was recently subjected to incredibly high loads caused by the interaction of the various uucp software, two receiving sites, and news transmission. Fortunately we're out of that thicket for now, but only in a hackish sort of way. We trickle articles into inews and...1982 November 30, Stuart, “Re: New proposal for handling net traffi - (nf)”, in net.news (Usenet), retrieved 15 Dec 2016, message-ID <bnews.sri-unix.4523>
    • A hackish solution is to use code switching, a technique of replacing a byte with a sequence of bytes headed by a special control character.2003, Erik T Ray, Learning XML
  3. (informal) Characteristic of hackers.
    • hackish slang; a hackish sense of humor

Examples of hackish in a sentence

  • Fortunately we're out of that thicket for now, but only in a hackish sort of way.1982 November 30, Stuart, “Re: New proposal for handling net traffi - (nf)”, in net.news (Usenet), retrieved 15 Dec 2016, message-ID...
  • The first two hacks in this chapter provide, well, hackish solutions to that conundrum.2006, Bruce Perry, Ajax hacks:

Synonyms of hackish

Forms of hackish

comparativemore hackish
superlativemost hackish

Origin of hackish

From hack + -ish.

Words formed from hackish

Questions about hackish

What does hackish mean?
Hackish means characteristic of hacks, or inferior writers.
How do you use hackish in a sentence?
Fortunately we're out of that thicket for now, but only in a hackish sort of way.
What part of speech is hackish?
Hackish is an adjective.

Words near hackish in the dictionary

  1. Hackington
  2. Hackintosh
  3. Hackintosher
  4. Hackintoshers
  5. Hackintoshes
  6. hackish
  7. hackishly
  8. hackishness
  9. Hackitt
  10. Hackl
  11. hacklab

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hackish (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-uk-hackish.ogg.

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