JERRY-BUILT • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Jerry-built

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/dʒˈɛri-bɪlt/ Listen

adjective

Jerry-built adj.

Built hastily and of bad materials; as, jerry-built houses.

Synonyms: slipshod, ramshackle, flimsy.

Developed in an unsystematic or inexpert manner; built haphazardly; used of objects, organizations, plans, etc.

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Etymology of 'Jerry-built'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Jerry-built" Quotes from Famous Books

... long way; every mile and every gallon of gasoline made Skidder madder; and when at length he arrived at the brand new, jerry-built apartment house inhabited by Max Sondheim, he had concluded that the Red Flag Club was an undesirable tenant and that it must be summarily ...

— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers

... exhilarated,—I confess that I was depressed. A more dismal-looking habitation one could hardly imagine. It was one of those dreadful jerry-built houses which, while they are still new, look old. It had quite possibly only been built a year or two, and yet, owing to neglect, or to poverty of construction, or to a combination of the two, it was already threatening to ...

— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... send them to the front when the front is in danger, or to the railways and repair shops when it is decided that the weakest point is that of transport. If its only task were to fight those organizations of loosely knit and only momentarily united interests which are opposed to it, those jerry-built alliances of Reactionaries with Liberals, United-Indivisible-Russians with Ukrainians, Agrarians with Sugar-Refiners, Monarchists with Republicans, that task would long ago have been finished. But it has to fight something infinitely stronger than these in fighting ...

— The Crisis in Russia - 1920 • Arthur Ransome

... assistants, coming out of employment with savings or 'help' from relations, of widows with a husband's insurance money, of the ill-trained sons of parsimonious fathers, replaces the fallen in the ill-equipped, jerry-built shops that ...

— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... to put back British industrialism into the factories and forms of the pre-war era as it would be to restore the Carthaginian Empire. There is a new economic Great Britain to-day, emergency made, jerry-built no doubt, a gawky, weedy giant, but a giant who may fill out to such dimensions as the German national system has never attained. Behind it is an idea, a new idea, the idea of the nation as one great economic system working ...

— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells