Word of the Day

: October 26, 2017

slapdash

adjective SLAP-dash

What It Means

: done or made without careful planning : haphazard, slipshod

slapdash in Context

"Sunflower Cottage just above the weir had been taken by two female animals…. More, it was being done properly, the River Bank's housewives agreed. There was none of this casual, slapdash housekeeping that bachelor gentlemen were so apt to consider sufficient." — Kij Johnson, The River Bank: A Sequel to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, 2017

"Much to my surprise, Gus didn't take me to task regarding my chronic gerund abuse or my slapdash approach to punctuation." — Jerry Nelson, The Farm Forum (Aberdeen, South Dakota), 11 Sept. 2017

Did You Know?

One of the first known uses of slapdash in English came in 1679 from the British poet and dramatist John Dryden, who used it as an adverb in his play The kind keeper; or Mr. Limberham: "Down I put the notes slap-dash." The Oxford English Dictionary defines this sense in part as "[w]ith, or as with, a slap and a dash," perhaps suggesting the notion of an action (such as painting) performed with quick, imprecise movements. Over 100 years later, the word acquired the adjectival sense with which we are more familiar today, describing something done in a hasty, careless, or haphazard manner.