roll-your-own

plural roll-your-owns

1. A type of cigarette made by the smoker by rolling loose tobacco in a rectangle of paper.

   A great many pipe smokers, apart from the many who simply died of old age, seem to have shifted to roll-your-owns, while a significant proportion of the tailor-made market went to women and younger male smokers.

   1999, Ian R. Tyrrell, Deadly Enemies: Tobacco and its Opponents in Australia, page 115

   2 more examples

   […]and when you raise the 10-cent cigarette, on which you get the same tax as you do on the higher-priced cigarette, the increase in roll-your-owns will go right ahead and cause a diminution in consumption due to that higher cost.

   1979, Bernard D. Reams, Internal Revenue Acts of the United States, 1909-1950: Legislative Histories, Laws, and Administrative Documents, volume 29, page 143

   You remember that, first of all, you never smoked anything but roll-your-owns? Tasman Gold Cut, and Zigzag rice papers. And you had this neat way of being able to roll a thin tight cigarette without looking at what your fingers were doing.

   1986, Keri Hulme, Te Kaihau: The Windeater, page 108

   Synonyms: RYO, rollie · Antonyms: tailor-made

1. not comparableBuilt for oneself as opposed to purchased ready-made.

   […] a director of KARL, likes the roll-your-own approach and is finishing up a 1500-watt […]

   1966, QST, page 83

   5 more examples

   However the emphasis of early networkers and computing services (not “where to go” just “how to get there”) can puzzle users new to the “roll-your-own” approach of research and scientific computing.

   1990, Peter Stone, JANET: A Report on Its Use for Libraries, British Library Research and Development Department, →ISBN, page 26

   RAM ICs, floppy controllers and other roll-your-own computer parts, right on up to complete motherboards and whole machines, are in great supply.

   1991, 73

   Will you opt for a preconfigured Web server solution or roll your own? […] As for upgrading the equipment, you unfortunately will find that your options are not quite as open as the roll-your-own approach.

   1996, David Harms, Barton C. Fiske, Jeffrey C. Rice, Web Site Programming with Java, McGraw-Hill, →ISBN, pages 438 and 440

   The disadvantages to roll-your-own are that the company is responsible for managing VPN configurations, and because traffic is transversing the Internet, there are no performance guarantees. Moreover, it typically is difficult to support latency-sensitive traffic, such as voice. However, a roll-your-own approach lets corporations establish a VPN to any site that has access to the Internet.

   2002 April 8, Irwin Lazar, “Variations on a VPN theme”, in Network World, page 45

   As you can see from the chart, Diver’s Security has an unusual, roll-your-own approach that allows you to combine four plans, each covering a different type of injury or expense.

   2004, Scuba Diving, page 91

2. not comparablecard gamesBeing or relating to a stud poker variant in which the player chooses which cards to turn up visible to the other players.