What does "ticky-tacky" mean?

Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design.

Ticky-tacky

adj, noun

adj, noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Noun

1
Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design. US, uncountable
"And the boys go into business, and marry and raise a family / In boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same."

Adjective

1
Made of this material; cheaply built, of low quality. US, not-comparable
"My first impression was that Phoenix was another American Dream (a la L.A.) come true—ticky-tacky tract housing complexes and mini-malls stretching boundlessly into the flat desert horizon."
2
Inferior, minor, trivial. broadly, not-comparable
"It almost seems that major discipline problems take care of themselves; it is the day-to-day little ticky-tacky issues that bind and scratch and itch until you find that you are boxed in with a class that you can no longer control."

"And the boys go into business, and marry and raise a family / In boxes made of ticky-tacky, and they all look just the same."

Probably reduplication of tacky. Apparently coined by Malvina Reynolds in the early 1960s (see quotation, below).

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