hackish

English

Etymology

From hack +‎ -ish.

Pronunciation

• Audio (UK):

  (file)

Adjective

hackish (comparative more hackish, superlative most hackish)

1. Characteristic of hacks, or inferior writers.
2. (computing, informal) Using, or characterised by, hacks: poorly designed workarounds.
   • 1982 November 30, Stuart, “Re: New proposal for handling net traffi - (nf)”, in net.news‎^[1] (Usenet), retrieved 2016-12-15, message-ID <bnews.sri-unix.4523>:

     Our site, ucbvax!menlo70!sri-unix, was recently subjected to incredibly high loads caused by the interaction of the various uucp software, two receiving sites, and news transmission. Fortunately we're out of that thicket for now, but only in a hackish sort of way. We trickle articles into inews and have terminated one of our neighbors. The other two possibilities (news batching and uucp sub-dirs) were considered and will probably be adopted at some point.

   • 2003, Erik T Ray, Learning XML:

     A hackish solution is to use code switching, a technique of replacing a byte with a sequence of bytes headed by a special control character.

   • 2006, Bruce Perry, Ajax hacks:

     The first two hacks in this chapter provide, well, hackish solutions to that conundrum.

3. (computing, informal) Characteristic of hackers.

   hackish slang; a hackish sense of humor

Synonyms

• hacky

Related terms

• hackishly