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Allin

band-aid

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈbændeɪd//

An adhesive bandage, a small piece of fabric or plastic that may be stuck to the skin in order to temporarily cover a small wound.

noun

  1. 1

    An adhesive bandage, a small piece of fabric or plastic that may be stuck to the skin in order to temporarily cover a small wound.

  2. 2

    informalA temporary or makeshift solution to a problem, created ad hoc and often with a lack of foresight.

    It was another of those political band-aids patted over a minor sore.

Etymology

Genericized trademark from Band-Aid, registered and coined by Johnson & Johnson in 1924 as band(age) + aid.

verb

  1. 1

    To apply an adhesive bandage.

    As a school nurse, Pat was used to band-aiding lots of scraped knees and elbows.

  2. 2

    figurativeTo apply a makeshift fix; to jury-rig.

    Rather than fix the code, we just band-aided the problem by hiding the error message.

    This is where the addictions theorists and therapists fail (perhaps for lack of nerve): they never strongly suggest that their critique should become the basis for concerted, collective therapy as well as individual therapy. They can't. To do so would mean risking their own dependency upon the system and upon the rewards they receive for band-aiding it.

Forms

plural
band-aids
past tense
band-aided
past participle
band-aided
present participle
band-aiding
third person singular
band-aids
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).