JERRY-BUILT • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Jerry-built

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/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.

See images of 'Jerry-built'

Etymology of 'Jerry-built'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar

"Jerry-built" Quotes from Famous Books

... passed in the train. But surely she ought to have apologised for bringing a girl reared in Edinburgh to a place like this. On one of the gates they passed was written "Hiemath," and there was something very characteristic of the jerry-built and decaying place in the cheap sentiment that had been too slovenly to spell its own name correctly. Yet to the left, over the housetops of foul black streets running upwards from the railway-lines, there shone the great silver plain, and afar off a channel set with white sailing-ships and steamers, ...

— The Judge • Rebecca West

... 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 tumble down. It was a small place, ...

— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... out to have a look at the neighbourhood, but after an hour's walk he had seen enough to kill any desire he might have felt for further exploration. The whole district was prosaic and unlovely, saturated with the spirit of municipal government. There were rows and rows of jerry-built houses running at right angles to the High Street, houses with small rooms and big rates, occupied by tired-looking men who hurried to the station about half-past eight every morning, and did not get back ...

— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... 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

... patriarchal basis, using their revenues for extensions, and depending on his faithful and well-satisfied stockholders for such further accessions of capital as the business might in his judgment need. About the time General Electric was most anxious to bolster up its jerry-built structure with the solid Westinghouse concern, the latter institution had begun the erection of some big new plants which required immediately several millions additional capital. Westinghouse prepared to apply to his stockholders for the required funds, and the announcement was to ...

— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson