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
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.
Meta’s Quest headsets were still clunky, and the software looked half-baked.
From Barron's • Jan. 16, 2026
And judging by its half-baked proposals, BP has either forgotten the lessons of what it termed a “catastrophe” or decided that catastrophe is an acceptable risk.
From Slate • Jan. 14, 2026
Critics were given seven episodes to preview out of the first season’s nine installments, enough to confirm that any emerging theories about its meaning can only be half-baked.
From Salon • Nov. 26, 2025
We usually die half-baked, so he finishes the cooking, turning up the heat.
From The Wall Street Journal • Nov. 13, 2025
It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can’t clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary.
From "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien
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.
