Meanings
- pluralplural onlyThe essential elements of something; the minimum viable set of elements; especially when they are described without going into detail.
He had only been taught the bare bones of the system, but carried on regardless.
2 more examples
The bare bones of a cookbook are its recipes, but as a genre it is so elastic and malleable that it can contain a range of other purposes and dimensions.
1982 April 10, Michael Bronski, “We Are How We Cook”, in Gay Community News, page 7Typically, this meant that the teams were turning around two sets a week, with a train rolling into the depot on a Sunday for what Hinze describes as a "big strip-out". This would pull the carriages back almost to the bare bones.
2025 July 23, Richard Wilcock, “A new dawn for the Electrostars”, in RAIL, number 1040, page 27
Origin
By metaphor with the skeleton versus the whole body including the flesh.
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
bare bones. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 2, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bare%20bones
“bare bones.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bare%20bones. Accessed November 2, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “bare bones,” accessed November 2, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/bare%20bones.
Source: bare bones on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.