half-baked
Americanadjective
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insufficiently cooked.
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not completed; insufficiently planned or prepared.
a half-baked proposal for tax reform.
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lacking mature judgment or experience; unrealistic.
adjective
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insufficiently baked
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informal foolish; stupid
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informal poorly planned or conceived
Etymology
Origin of half-baked
First recorded in 1615–25
Explanation
You can use the adjective half-baked to describe your sadly underdone cupcakes, or in a figurative way to criticize your brother's crazy business idea. When something's half-baked, it's just never going to work. If your plan for moving to Iceland is half-baked, it means you haven't thought the whole thing through. This metaphorical meaning came from the original definition of half-baked, literally "baked halfway" or "underdone." If something's half-baked, nobody wants to eat it — it's useless. An idea or plan, likewise, is half-baked if isn't worth wasting time on.
Vocabulary lists containing half-baked
Idioms and Expressions, List 2
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
Companies will respond by either rushing half-baked products to market, steering clear of high-risk diseases, or abandoning incremental advances that might later trigger should-have-done-it-sooner tort suits.
From The Wall Street Journal • May 5, 2026
Meta’s Quest headsets were still clunky, and the software looked half-baked.
From Barron's • Jan. 16, 2026
Can Rachel McAdams sue the attorney general for this half-baked theft of her iconic movie villain?
From Salon • Oct. 13, 2025
On Monday, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent economic think-tank, said that the chancellor should avoid "directionless tinkering and half-baked fixes" when trying to boost the government's tax take in the Budget.
From BBC • Oct. 13, 2025
The negative column filled up fastest with words like stupid, disgraceful, foolish, laughable, wasteful, outraged, idiotic, scandalous, uninformed, half-baked, shamefully.
From "The Landry News" by Andrew Clements
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
