Word.ws English Dictionary

need more time in the oven

need more time in the oven verb: of a project or an idea, to be insufficiently polished or thought out; requiring more time to attain acceptable quality.

Verb

need more time in the oven (third-person singular simple present needs more time in the oven, present participle needing more time in the oven, simple past and past participle needed more time in the oven)

  1. (figuratively) Of a project or an idea, to be insufficiently polished or thought out; requiring more time to attain acceptable quality.
    • Their draft of the new business case doesn't yet say enough about the market research they've done — it clearly needs more time in the oven.
    • Though Jevons's theory was more than half-baked, it needed more time in the oven, since he forgot to calculate that poor harvests in Asia would hit England only after a time lag.1996, Todd G. Buchholz, From Here to Economy, Penguin Publishing Group, →ISBN

Forms of need more time in the oven

third-person singular presentneeds more time in the oven
present participleneeding more time in the oven
past participleneeded more time in the oven
pastneeded more time in the oven

Questions about need more time in the oven

What does need more time in the oven mean?
Need more time in the oven means of a project or an idea, to be insufficiently polished or thought out; requiring more time to attain acceptable quality.
What part of speech is need more time in the oven?
Need more time in the oven is a verb.
What is the past tense of need more time in the oven?
The past tense of need more time in the oven is needed more time in the oven.

Words near need more time in the oven in the dictionary

  1. neechie
  2. neechies
  3. neechis
  4. need
  5. need I say more
  6. need more time in the oven
  7. need no introduction
  8. need not
  9. need one's bumps feeling
  10. need one's bumps felt
  11. need one's eyes checked

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: need more time in the oven (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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