Is It 'Jerry-Rigged' or 'Jury-Rigged'?

Both of these terms are actually valid, though they have slightly different meanings, and only one of them is based in sailors' slang. Learn the history of 'jury-rigged' and 'jerry-rigged' -- and how to use them correctly -- in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/jury-rigged-vs-jerry-rigged.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, it's easy in the English language to
mix up words and phrases. Take it from someone who
says words into a microphone for a living. One that
often gets me is having read a word but never

(00:22):
heard it aloud, and thus messing up the pronunciation. If
you've been listening to the show for any amount of time,
I am sure that you have heard me do this.
But we have so many homophones and other sound alikes
in English that our already confusing idioms can easily get misstated.
After all, for all intentsive purposes, it is a doggy

(00:45):
dog world out there. Ah, that should be for all
intents and purposes, it is a dog eat dog world.
I'm gonna nip this example in the bud, not the butt,
and get to today's point. If something is put together,
shall we say, interestingly, is it jury rigged or jerry rigged?

(01:09):
This is one case where both are actually valid phrases.
You can use them more or less interchangeably, but they
do have slightly different meanings. A jury rigged refers to
a clever but temporary solution to a problem. A something
built quickly making use of whatever's on hand, whereas jerry

(01:29):
rigged refers to something that was built hastily and poorly
from the start. The two phrases have grown together in
modern English use, but they have different enymological histories. The
term jury rigged first caught on in these seventeen hundreds,
where it was recorded in newspaper articles as a strictly

(01:50):
nautical term. Jury in this case does not mean a
group of people sworn to fairly decide the outcome of
a court case or contest. At the time, the word
jury could mean a group of people who judges something,
but it could also describe something makeshift that had been
improvised for temporary use, perhaps especially in a nautical emergency.

(02:16):
The two homophones come from different roots. The judgment type
of jury dates all the way back to a Latin
word meaning to swear. The makeshift type of jury comes
from the Middle English word jury, meaning improvised. In reference
to sailing around the fourteen hundreds, a jury sail was
a sail that had been repaired well enough to catch

(02:39):
the wind and get you where you were going. The
rigged in jury rig also originated in the fourteen hundreds
and refers to the rigging of a boat or ship,
you know, the ropes and braces that control the sails
and support the masts of the vessel. So taken together,
the phrase jury rigged, although nautical in origin, refers generally

(03:03):
to a solution that repairs or replaces something well enough
for now, I think mcgeiver. It's not fancy, but it works.
And that's not exactly what jerry rigged means. It isn't
well understood how the term jerry rigged originated, but okay,
sometime in the mid eighteen hundreds, like the eighteen thirties

(03:26):
to the eighteen sixties, were not totally sure. The term
jerry built popped up, possibly around Lancashire in the north
of England and maybe Liverpool or thereabouts. Jerry built described
something that was built cheaply or crudely, without capability or finesse.
It was an insult. It's thought to have originated in

(03:49):
the masculine first name Jerry, but no one is sure how.
And it's important to point out here that the English
dismissive slang for German soldiers being jerry didn't crop up
until World War One at least fifty years later, and
is thought to be unrelated anyway. However, it came to
be jerry built, and a related noun, jerrybuilder, entered the

(04:14):
English language in the eighteen hundreds. From there, these words
seem to have crossed paths with jury rigged, and this
is probably how we got the term jerry rigged, meaning
something built shodily or without a good plan, which is
an important distinction from jury rigged. Something jury rigged might

(04:35):
look silly but can actually be very clever and functional,
but something jerry rigged looks silly and is silly. Today's
episode is based on the article is it jury rigged
or jerry rigged? On how stuffworks dot Com, written by
Lori L. Dove. Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in

(04:57):
partnership with how stuffworks dot Com and is produced by
Time Tyler Klang. Four more podcasts my heart Radio, visit
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.