Word.ws English Dictionary

rough and ready

rough and ready adjective: crude or unpolished, but still fit for use; good enough.

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
    • There was a rough and ready rule-of-thumb test of truth[…]1873–1884 (date written), Samuel Butler, chapter LXV, in R[ichard] A[lexander] Streatfeild, editor, The Way of All Flesh, London: Grant Richards, published 1903, →OCLC, page 291

Proper noun capitalized: Rough and Ready

Rough and Ready

  1. A census-designated place in Nevada County, California, United States.

rough and ready meaning in Bengali and Malayalam

rough and ready in Bengali

অপরিণত, অমার্জিত, কিন্তু তবুও ব্যবহারযোগ্য, যথেষ্ট ভালো

rough and ready in Malayalam

simple, basic, crude
താൽക്കാലികമായ, സങ്കീർണ്ണമല്ലാത്ത, തൽക്കാലത്തേക്കുള്ള, അടിസ്ഥാനപരമായ, ലളിതമായ, അനാഡംബര

Forms of rough and ready

comparativemore rough and ready
superlativemost rough and ready
alternative formrough-and-ready

Questions about rough and ready

What does rough and ready mean?
Rough and ready means crude or unpolished, but still fit for use; good enough.
What is rough and ready in Bengali?
Rough and ready in Bengali is অপরিণত, অমার্জিত, কিন্তু তবুও ব্যবহারযোগ্য. See Rough and ready meaning in Bengali.
What part of speech is rough and ready?
Rough and ready can be an adjective or a proper noun.

Words near rough and ready in the dictionary

  1. rouges
  2. rouget
  3. Rouget's rail
  4. Rouget's rails
  5. rough
  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); rough and ready (Bengali Wiktionary) (page history and authors); rough and ready (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license). 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-au-rough and ready.ogg.

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