at the ready

1. 1.

   ready for immediate use

   “soldiers with guns at the ready”

   “students with pens and notebooks at the ready”

   Similarready

Questions about at the ready

What does at the ready mean?

at the ready means "ready for immediate use".

Is at the ready a common word?

at the ready is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.