Bare-bones

adj

adj ·Uncommon ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Minimalist; lacking that which is not essential. idiomatic

    "Meals on early space flights were bare-bones affairs; able to supply nutrition, but severely lacking in palatability."

  2. 2
    Describes a computer sold preassembled, but without certain essential components, such as a processor, memory, and hard drive. idiomatic

    "Emil bought a bare-bones rig and a new CPU at the computer show, then popped in his old hard drive."

Synonyms

All synonyms
austerebarebargainbasiccheapdefault

Example

More examples

"The menu at the restaurant is very bare-bones."

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.