Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- intransitive verb To make, compose, or perform with little or no preparation.
- intransitive verb To make or provide from available materials.
- intransitive verb To make, compose, or perform something extemporaneously.
- intransitive verb To make do with whatever materials are at hand.
from The Century Dictionary.
- To compose and recite or sing without premeditation; speak or perform extemporaneously, especially verse or music.
- To do or perform anything on the spur of the moment for a special occasion; contrive or bring about in an offhand way.
- To compose verses or music extemporaneously; hence, to do anything on the spur of the moment or in an offhand way.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb To compose, recite, or sing extemporaneously, especially in verse; to extemporize; also, to play upon an instrument, or to act, extemporaneously.
- transitive verb To bring about, arrange, do, or make, immediately or on short notice, without previous preparation and with no known precedent as a guide.
- transitive verb To invent, or provide, offhand, or on the spur of the moment.
- intransitive verb To produce or render extemporaneous compositions, especially in verse or in music, without previous preparation; hence, to do anything offhand.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- verb To make something up or
invent it as one goes on; to proceed guided only byimagination ,instinct , andguesswork rather than by a careful plan.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- verb perform without preparation
- verb manage in a makeshift way; do with whatever is at hand
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
Support
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Examples
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That was - that's actually more fun to me, because in live concerts what we do is we take the material that we composed for the recording and we stretch it out and we improvise, which is what brings joy to both of us.
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That was - that's actually more fun to me, because in live concerts what we do is we take the material that we composed for the recording and we stretch it out and we improvise, which is what brings joy to both of us.
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At one point he was bold enough to ask his audience to toss him a word to improvise a rap on.
Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph Ivan Hewett 2011
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TO IMPROVISE or not to improvise, that is the question.
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The one good thing about this movie is that we can "improvise" our lines and actions, since there is no defined director except the Almighty.
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The one good thing about this movie is that we can "improvise" our lines and actions, since there is no defined director except the Almighty.
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That's right: send Nagin up to the microphone and tell him to "improvise" for ten minutes and I promise you he'll make national headlines!
Archive 2007-03-01 2007
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He testified "that he had cut the thiopental [the drug that renders a person unconscious] dosage he gave inmates by half because a change in drug packaging forced him to 'improvise'."
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Somewhere I read I think in EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS that Hal Ashby was allegedly stoned throughout the whole shoot, letting the actors "improvise" their dialogue.
From our friend Fred Blosser Ed Gorman 2007
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Somewhere I read I think in EASY RIDERS, RAGING BULLS that Hal Ashby was allegedly stoned throughout the whole shoot, letting the actors "improvise" their dialogue.
Archive 2007-10-01 Ed Gorman 2007
chained_bear commented on the word improvise
"Savage was improvising here, or, as it's sometimes called, lying."
—Charles Leerhsen, Crazy Good: The True Story of Dan Patch (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 241
October 28, 2008