Hackish

adj, slang

adj, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Characteristic of hacks, or inferior writers.
  2. 2
    Using, or characterised by, hacks: poorly designed workarounds. informal

    "Our site, ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix, was recently subjected to incredibly high loads caused by the interaction of the various uucp software, two receiving sites, and news transmission. Fortunately we're out of that thicket for now, but only in a hackish sort of way. We trickle articles into inews and have terminated one of our neighbors. The other two possibilities (news batching and uucp sub-dirs) were considered and will probably be adopted at some point."

  3. 3
    Characteristic of hackers. informal

    "hackish slang; a hackish sense of humor"

Example

More examples

"Our site, ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix, was recently subjected to incredibly high loads caused by the interaction of the various uucp software, two receiving sites, and news transmission. Fortunately we're out of that thicket for now, but only in a hackish sort of way. We trickle articles into inews and have terminated one of our neighbors. The other two possibilities (news batching and uucp sub-dirs) were considered and will probably be adopted at some point."

Etymology

From hack + -ish.

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