rough-and-ready

1. 1.

   crude but effective for the purpose at hand

   Similareffective

Questions about rough-and-ready

What does rough-and-ready mean?

rough-and-ready means "crude but effective for the purpose at hand".

How many syllables are in rough-and-ready?

rough-and-ready has 5 syllables and divides as ro-ug-h-an-d-rea-dy under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

Is rough-and-ready a common word?

rough-and-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.