ticky-tacky
ticky-tacky noun: cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design.
Noun
ticky-tacky (uncountable)
- Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design.
- And the boys go into business, and marry and raise a family / In boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same.1962, Malvina Reynolds, “Little Boxes”
- For there was no roadside ticky-tacky at all, no Burger Kings, no Golden Arches, no car lots, no shopping malls and parking lots, no sprawling cheap housing developments, none of the endless suburban crudscape that marked the ride from the airport to any major American city.2013 May 27, Norman Spinrad, Russian Spring, Hachette UK, →ISBN
Adjective
ticky-tacky (not comparable)
- Made of this material; cheaply built, of low quality.
- My first impression was that Phoenix was another American Dream (a la L.A.) come true—ticky-tacky tract housing complexes and mini-malls stretching boundlessly into the flat desert horizon.2013, K.T. Berger, Where the Road and the Sky Collide, page 112
- Inferior, minor, trivial.
- It almost seems that major discipline problems take care of themselves; it is the day-to-day little ticky-tacky issues that bind and scratch and itch until you find that you are boxed in with a class that you can no longer control.2010, Charles Mertz, So, You Want to be a Teacher, page 99
- Synonyms:
- poor man's, streets behind, ignorable, trifling, BTEC, cheapie, cullionly, daddocky, inferior, less than
Synonyms of ticky-tacky
30 more synonymsFewer synonyms
Forms of ticky-tacky
| alternative form | ticky tacky |
|---|
Origin of ticky-tacky
Probably reduplication of tacky. Apparently coined by Malvina Reynolds in the early 1960s (see quotation, below).
Questions about ticky-tacky
- What does ticky-tacky mean?
- Ticky-tacky means cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design.
- What part of speech is ticky-tacky?
- Ticky-tacky can be a noun or an adjective.
Words near ticky-tacky in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: ticky-tacky (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: “ticky-tacky.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/ticky-tacky. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.