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Synonyms

-rigged

British  

adjective

  1. (in combination) (of a sailing vessel) having a rig of a certain kind

    ketch-rigged

    schooner-rigged
"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Explanation

When something is rigged, it's fully equipped and ready to go. You'll usually find this adjective describing a sailboat or ship with masts and sails. A fully rigged boat has all the necessary ropes, sails, and masts that it needs to travel on the water. While this nautical adjective is narrowly focused on sailing vessels, you can also use rigged to mean "fraudulent" or "tampered with." If a politician talks about a rigged election, he is not-so-subtly accusing his opponent of conspiring to illegally manipulate the outcome of a vote. This meaning comes from a now-obsolete meaning of rig, "a trick."

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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.