Quick-and-dirty

adj, noun, slang

adj, noun, slang ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An inexpensive, inelegant eatery; a greasy spoon. US, slang
  2. 2
    A quick, temporary fix, estimate, or the like. idiomatic

    "The car broke down but we managed to do a quick-and-dirty and were back on the road in fifteen minutes."

Adjective
  1. 1
    Done or constructed in a hasty, approximate, temporarily adequate manner, but not exact, fully formed, or reliable for a long period of time. idiomatic

    "I can do a quick-and-dirty market analysis in time for the meeting tomorrow."

Synonyms

All synonyms
bodgedevil-may-carelash-upmake-doprecipitantprecipitate

Example

More examples

"I can do a quick-and-dirty market analysis in time for the meeting tomorrow."

Etymology

The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first usage of this phrase in 1896 in the Boston Globe to describe a place to eat. The first use meaning "slipshod" was from 1939 in the gun-slinging, American Western fiction paperback, "Bounty Guns" by Luke Short.

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