1. Word finder
  2. Word definitions
  3. half-baked

Find the word definition

What is "half-baked"

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
half-baked
adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a half-baked idea (=an idea that has not been carefully thought out)
▪ It’s yet another of the government’s half-baked ideas.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ What we've got here is a half-baked proposal that still needs a great deal of work.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Both Hayman's suggestions were too loose and half-baked for a man of his devious cunning to consider seriously for a moment.
▪ Even if his history is half-baked, there is nothing amateurish about Mr Severin's voyage.
▪ For certain technologies, notably strategic defence against nuclear weapons, researching makes more sense than deploying a half-baked system.
▪ Here is the social democrat refusing to condemn the absurdities he chronicles so well; or simply producing half-baked observations.
▪ Like other Thatcherite creations, the Enterprise Allowance Scheme is chock-a-block with buzzwords whose connection with reality is, at best, half-baked.
▪ The question is whether, having raised the issue, green consumerism then legitimises a half-baked response.
▪ There are more cranes than half-baked themes done to excess.
▪ Youth culture has impregnated generation upon generation with half-baked alternatives.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
half-baked

half-baked \half-baked\ a.

  1. Insufficiently or poorly planned or thought out; impractical or unrealistic; as, a half-baked proposal; half-baked ideas; -- of plans, theories, proposals, etc.

  2. Insufficiently cooked; -- of food.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
half-baked

1620s as "underdone;" 1855 in sense of "silly;" see half + bake (v.).

Wiktionary
half-baked

a. 1 (&lit Partially cooked by heating in an oven English) 2 (context idiomatic informal frequently derisive English) Incomplete; (context of an idea or scheme English) not fully planned or carefully considered, ill-conceived, unsound or badly thought-out; (context of a person English) foolish or having no common sense.

WordNet
half-baked

  1. adj. foolish; totally unsound; "an impractical solution"; "a crazy scheme"; "half-baked ideas"; "a screwball proposal without a prayer of working" [syn: crazy, screwball, softheaded]

  2. insufficiently cooked [syn: underdone]

Usage examples of "half-baked".

Thus, we stocked our little overpriced kitchen with a motley assortment of foodstuff based on my half-hour crash course in diabetic nutrition and my half-baked notion of what the nutritionist had told me.

Annette a virgin taste to form would be better than to have the silly, half-baked predilections of the English middle-class to deal with.

Moreover they must abstain from the ordinary articles of diet and confine themselves to half-baked cakes of sago and other unpalatable viands.

But she knew her worser half would not give over until she had her half-baked way.

It continued like that for two weeks, waking at dawn for calisthenics and brainteasers, telling Katie my half-baked ideas about Colonna so that she would have to slow down to listen, then forcing myself to run faster so that she would have less time to tell me how I was wrong.

The theories that come out of peak experiences are almost always, to use an apt metaphor, half-baked.

Flippant, flyblow, half-baked wiseacreing is about the worst thing in the world, compared to honest ignorance.

I shiver in my boots every time I send one of you half-baked not-quite-officers up to the Fleet, knowing what a Frankensteinian monster I may be turning loose on a good combat team.

Annette a virgin taste to form would be better than to have the silly, half-baked predilections of the English middle-class to deal with.

Even the half-baked economists at the IMF should know that holding back government spending in a contracting economy is like turning off the engines on an aeroplane in stall.

He couldn't even beat Porky Logan, a gross man whose vote could be bought for fifty bucks, who bragged that he had not got beyond the seventh grade but that he could get more new roads and state money for Timucuan County than any half-baked radical, undoubtedly backed by the burrheads and the N.

A bunch of no-good tramps, half-baked defeatists playing cribbage for matches!

On the surface, it begged to be identified as a mere lie, a vicious but half-baked slander, but that was double bluff.

Likely the same authority on Indians as the one who decided they prayed to a Great Spirit who presided over a half-baked Christian heaven called the Happy Hunting Ground.

Like a lot of people who have no money, Knoppy had some half-baked ideas about people who had it, and the foremost of these was that wealth was achieved, and held, only by people who were essentially base.