mess around with (something)

idiom

informal

1

: to use or do (something) in a way that is not very serious

I'm not really a painter; I just like to mess around with paints.

She spent the evening messing around with the computer.

2

: to handle or play with (something) in a careless or foolish way

Stop messing around with the stereo.

Examples of mess around with (something) in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Cincinnati does not mess around with its beer, and St. Patrick's Day on Sunday, March 17, is no exception. —Grace Tucker, The Enquirer, 15 Mar. 2024

Also, every studio needs a big tub of random percussion instruments and bells and rattles and blocks that are great to mess around with and invariably find their way onto scores just to liven things up. —Lily Moayeri, SPIN, 15 Feb. 2024

While the Coens mess around with genre in each chapter and the cast differs from story to story, the six narratives are given a sense of consistency courtesy of the unique Coen voice, which the pair previously deployed on projects like True Grit and No Country for Old Men. —EW.com, 8 Nov. 2023

While a standard stateful firewall concerns itself with TCP, UDP, and ICMP packets at layers 3 and 4, a WAF operates up at layer 7 and can mess around with application traffic. —Lee Hutchinson, Ars Technica, 9 Aug. 2023

Some songs take 30 minutes and some take five different sessions to mess around with. —Chris Willman, Variety, 30 Nov. 2023

The expansion means that a lot more people can choose to mess around with SGE. —Jay Peters, The Verge, 8 Nov. 2023

The defending Super Bowl champion, Kansas City is rightly the favorite at home, but with a tendency to start the season slow and then race to wins, the team may not want to mess around with the Lions. —Benjamin Hoffman, New York Times, 7 Sep. 2023

More:'Don't mess around with this': Historic Hurricane Idalia barrels toward Florida. —Doyle Rice, USA TODAY, 29 Aug. 2023