"ticky-tacky" meaning in English

See ticky-tacky in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Adjective

Etymology: Probably reduplication of tacky. Apparently coined by Malvina Reynolds in the early 1960s (see quotation, below). Etymology templates: {{glossary|reduplication}} reduplication Head templates: {{en-adj|-}} ticky-tacky (not comparable)
  1. (US) Made of this material; cheaply built, of low quality. Tags: US, not-comparable
    Sense id: en-ticky-tacky-en-adj-NixsRWEQ Categories (other): American English, English apophonic reduplications, English entries with incorrect language header, Pages with 1 entry, Pages with entries Disambiguation of English apophonic reduplications: 63 4 33 Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 66 7 28 Disambiguation of Pages with 1 entry: 74 7 19 Disambiguation of Pages with entries: 79 2 19
  2. (by extension) Inferior, minor, trivial. Tags: broadly, not-comparable
    Sense id: en-ticky-tacky-en-adj-~HMjSY2N
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: ticky tacky

Noun

Etymology: Probably reduplication of tacky. Apparently coined by Malvina Reynolds in the early 1960s (see quotation, below). Etymology templates: {{glossary|reduplication}} reduplication Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} ticky-tacky (uncountable)
  1. (US) Cheap, low-quality building material, especially as that used to make conventional suburban housing of a uniform design. Tags: US, uncountable
    Sense id: en-ticky-tacky-en-noun-jiBEtjlm Categories (other): American English
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: ticky tacky

Alternative forms

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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-12-21 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-12-04 using wiktextract (d8cb2f3 and 4e554ae). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.