yak shaving
yak shaving noun: any apparently useless activity which, by allowing one to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows one to solve a larger problem.
Noun
yak shaving (uncountable)
- Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing one to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows one to solve a larger problem.
- I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.
- A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task.
- I looked at a reference manual for my car just to answer one question, but I spent the whole afternoon with my nose buried in it, just yak shaving, and got no work done on the car itself.
- For quotations using this term, see Citations:yak shaving.
Origin of yak shaving
Coined by Carlin Vieri in his time at the MIT AI Lab (1993–1998) after viewing a segment at the end of "The Boy Who Cried Rat!" (1991), the sixth episode of the first season of The Ren and Stimpy Show. The segment featured "Yak Shaving Day", a Christmas-like holiday where participants watch for the shaven yak to float by in his enchanted canoe.
Questions about yak shaving
- What does yak shaving mean?
- Yak shaving means any apparently useless activity which, by allowing one to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows one to solve a larger problem.
- What part of speech is yak shaving?
- Yak shaving is a noun.
Words near yak shaving in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: yak shaving (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-yak shaving.wav.
Cite this entry: “yak shaving.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/yak_shaving. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.