Definitions
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- Constructed hastily and with flimsy materials.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- adj. Built hastily and of bad materials.
- adj. Developed in an unsystematic or inexpert manner; built haphazardly; -- used of objects, organizations, plans, etc.
WordNet 3.0
- adj. of inferior workmanship and materials
Examples
“Deep in a disused Amtrak tunnel beneath the west side of Manhattan, homeless men and women inhabited jerry-built huts, living off scraps and siphoning electricity to cook and brighten the way.”
The Wall Street Journal: The Subterranean Homelessness Blues
“If he is not our "worst president," as Donald Trump would have it, his sweeping domestic initiatives—especially his stimulus package and health-care reform—were so jerry-built and high-handed that they generated a virtual revolution in America's normally subdued middle class.”
“Anyway, this isn't like spraying paint on a bridge, it's like quickly adding an extra, slightly jerry-built span – which I think would be witty, if less deliverable by aerosol.”
“Like one of the postwar megastructures Hatherley cherishes, it may be a bit jerry-built in places, but it is bold and original, and it may change how you see British cities.”
The Guardian: A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain by Owen Hatherley – review
“It's a vast improvement over the jerry-built box speakers through which the New World Symphony used to pipe its concerts to the Lincoln Road Mall.”
“Although many buildings are no longer made of wood which is too expensive and hard to maintain, Japanese cities still look a little jerry-built, rather like movie sets, as though in anticipation of impermanence—less like Manhattan, more like Los Angeles.”
“It was in another jerry-built craft, the 51-foot, three-mast Son of Town Hall, that Mr. Neutrino succeeded in crossing the Atlantic, casting off from Newfoundland with his wife, two companions and three dogs.”
The Wall Street Journal: Unmoored on Land, an Adventurer at Sea
“The early, jerry-built propeller planes transformed into air-cushioned jetliners, then powerful jumbo jets.”
“The jerry-built explosive device in the Times Square plot, while dangerous, was described by multiple law enforcement officials and outside experts as of unsophisticated, even amateurish design.”
The Wall Street Journal: Police Find Owner of SUV Used in Bomb Plot
“MARVELS, the Multi-object APO Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey, would set a record for jerry-built acronyms and hunt for planets around other stars, partly for the sake of the planets themselves, partly to figure out how solar systems form.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘jerry-built’.
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hasty amateur manufacture
fudging it
wangle, fudge, parry, hedge, merganser, coddle, sidestep, duck, dodge, unworkmanlike pra..., botch, bungle and 13 more...
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tom, dick and harry
merry andrew, spotted dick, black jack, lazy susan, bloody mary, charley horse, doubting thomas, willy nilly, jolly roger, peg leg, catherine wheel, charlotte russe and 156 more...
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Words grabbed from real life conversa...
If I've seen it, heard it, or marvelled at it, I'll stick it here.
cruft, ermine, redundant, shakespearean, camino, marvelous, stupendous, chagrin, shaven, sleek, smug, stillness and 325 more...
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Theophilus North
Words from the novel by Thornton Wilder.
Theophilus, bicycle, Newport, cully, Persis, Hard-hearted Hannah, lazaret, jalopy, Gulliver, tennis, typewrite, breathings and 290 more...
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Words That Populate My Mind
This is a collection of words I love, old ones that I love the sound of when I repeat them for years and new ones coined in news articles on up and coming trends and technologies - most of them I k...
aroma, mojo, blithely, fringe, fray, synchronicity, doublespeak, buzzword, thoughtcrime, portmanteau, newspeak, oldspeak and 963 more...
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new words
faulty parallelism, antebellum, lucubrate, retronym, asyndeton, polysyndeton, chiasmus, laconic, dysphemism, zeugma, subpoena, dialectic and 130 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for jerry-built.
asativum Wikipedia, citing a couple of sources, says its origin are different than jury-rigged, which it says the OED traces to 1788.
The alt.usage.english FAQ has an interesting, if ultimately ambiguous, discussion of the two phrases. Jun 28, 2008
jrome I read that too! I meant to look it up on the spot, but didn't have a dictionary handy. Where I grew up, CNY, folks always said "jerry-rigged." I think it means the same thing. Jan 22, 2007
ecrivaine33 I never heard this phrase before until today when I came across it in an article in which Middle East historian David Fromkin said he sees "a breakup of the jerry-built nation," when referring to Iraq's bleak future. Jan 22, 2007