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cut-and-dried
[ kuht-n-drahyd ]
adjective
- prepared or settled in advance; not needing much thought or discussion:
a cut-and-dried decision.
- lacking in originality or spontaneity; routine; boring:
a lecture that was cut-and-dried.
Word History and Origins
Origin of cut-and-dried1
Idioms and Phrases
Ready-made, predetermined and not changeable. For example, The procedure is not quite cut and dried—there's definitely room for improvisation . This expression originally alluded to herbs for sale in a shop, as opposed to fresh, growing herbs. [c. 1900]Example Sentences
The woman felt a certain fainting of purpose at the cut-and-dried programme presented in that dry manner by the dry old man.
Once more she was all for luxury and ease and calmness, for the pleasant, soothing, cut-and-dried thing.
It may be that our feelings will thus be more interesting than a cut-and-dried treatise of the land and its inhabitants.
The councils were no longer the orderly conferences of savants over cut-and-dried maps.
In such matters an ounce of personal experience is worth a pound of cut-and-dried theory.
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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.
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