Etymology

quick-and-dirty

Today it means: Done or constructed in a hasty, approximate, temporarily adequate manner, but not exact, fully formed, or reliable for a long period of time. Full definition →

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The story

The Oxford English Dictionary shows the first usage of this phrase in 1896 in the Boston Globe to describe a place to eat. The first use meaning "slipshod" was from 1939 in the gun-slinging, American Western fiction paperback, "Bounty Guns" by Luke Short.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.