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.
Or they resort to fanciful or half-baked plans if they get sick.
From MarketWatch ● Jun. 15, 2026
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
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
His punishment is the Word, and his deficiencies are failures of words—as when he grows impatient with translation and strikes out precariously on his own, telling parables in his wildly half-baked Kikongo.
From "The Poisonwood Bible" by Barbara Kingsolver
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.
