Word.ws English Dictionary

rough-and-ready

rough-and-ready is the alternative spelling of rough and ready.

Meaning of rough and ready

Adjective

rough and ready (comparative more rough and ready, superlative most rough and ready)

  1. (idiomatic) Crude or unpolished, but still fit for use; good enough.
    • [A] dozen Americans could, at any time, construct a house, the ‘rough and ready’ habits of the people usually teaching them, in a rude way, a good deal of a great many other arts, besides this of the carpenter.1849, James Fenimore Cooper, chapter 15, in The Sea Lions

See all 2 meanings of rough and ready

Forms of rough-and-ready

comparativemore rough-and-ready
superlativemost rough-and-ready

Questions about rough-and-ready

What is rough-and-ready the alternative spelling of?
Rough-and-ready is the alternative spelling of rough and ready.

Words near rough-and-ready in the dictionary

  1. rough up
  2. rough up the bullpen
  3. rough vacuum
  4. rough vacuums
  5. Rough Wooing
  6. rough-and-ready
  7. rough-and-tumble
  8. rough-and-tumbled
  9. rough-and-tumbles
  10. rough-and-tumbling
  11. rough-around-the-edges

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rough-and-ready (page history and authors); rough and ready (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: “rough-and-ready.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rough-and-ready. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.