Definitions

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Imperfectly learned.

Etymologies

Sorry, no etymologies found.

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Examples

  • Mr. Kuroda said markets may have only "half-learned the lesson" of the Kobe earthquake in 1995, Japan's last major natural disaster.

    ADB Official Skeptical of Future Yen Surges Dinny McMahon 2011

  • Silly cracker-barrel stuff, mostly, although he had a curious store of half-learned knowledge; Bunyan was a favourite, and he was well up on Napoleon and Caesar and assorted military history.

    THE NUMBERS 2010

  • I say this lesson was half-learned because, despite the obvious advantages of having someone "in-house" to keep me on the right track in terms of plot and to prevent me from skipping down descriptive primrose paths, I resist.

    Lucinda Week, Day 7: What Will I See When I Look Back 2009

  • This was a lesson I had half-learned in the writing of my fourth novel Pas de Chat.

    Lucinda Week, Day 7: What Will I See When I Look Back 2009

  • He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.

    WAR News from Mad Plato 2008

  • Wozniak refused to be satisfied with the broken, half-learned English that so many otherwise smart students were stuck with.

    Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm By Gary Wolf 2008

  • Wozniak refused to be satisfied with the broken, half-learned English that so many otherwise smart students were stuck with.

    Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm Gary Wolf 2008

  • He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.

    Archive 2008-06-01 News from Mad Plato 2008

  • Where I would scribble volumes of half-learned essays and juke my way through government class based solely on memory, he tried to base his learning on what he had studied that morning, over a fried egg and a cup of coffee at the kitchen table.

    outfoxed Diary Entry outfoxed 2006

  • The learned, the half-learned, and those who were neither, but fancied themselves equal to both, came boldly to hazard their beards, and all shamefully lost them.

    The History of the Caliph Vathek 2004

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