bare-bones

bare bones

1. noun The essential and most elementary parts of something; a general outline or summary. Please don't go through each line item in the budget—just give me the bare bones.
2. adjective Minimally furnished or adorned. The apartment is pretty bare bones, but rent is cheap, and I don't spend much time there, so I don't mind.
See also: bare, bone
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

bare-bones

Cliché limited; stripped down; lacking refinements or extras. This one is the bare-bones model. It has no accessories at all.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • high
  • high, wide, and handsome
  • wear (one's) apron high
  • bummer
  • angle
  • angling
  • mickey mouse
  • rear end
  • garbage
  • fire and brimstone
References in periodicals archive
The bare-bones market will be a crossing network that serves simply as a conduit.
This catalogue of the bibliographical exhibition on early modern antiquarianism held at Wolfenbuttel in the summer of 1994 constitutes a useful handbook for students of the field, a well-informed companion to Ludwig Schudt's bare-bones bibliographical guide of 1930, Le Guide di Roma.
They soon found, though, that sophisticated planning tools were needed, tools that federal agencies in the bare-bones 90s no longer had the personnel or budget to develop.
Year followed long year within the narrow confines of that bare-bones Galilean village.
For those who want to "rough it," there are a dozen bare-bones campsites where campers must provide all their own gear.
Moren than 50 years old, this aluminum-roofed, bare-bones "hotel" sits in central Honokaa, the heart of sugar cane country.
The brisk, brief feature appears more atmospheric than terrifying, but its bare-bones tale gets under the skin, telling of a pregnant teen whose impending sacrifice to a backwoods community's worship pit causes hell to break loose.
The focus is on learning what play to make at what stage of the game: here two fine bridge teachers and authors explain how to make a plan as a declarer in an easy step-by-step process accessible by even bare-bones beginners.
Digital photography is covered in a bare-bones, basic guide for novices which will help such an audience begin with a solid foundation in photography principles.
The Little Food Book: You Are What You Eat (The Disinformation Company, $9.95) offers up the bare-bones facts about food, its production, and its effects on our lives in a fun, easy-to-digest format.
So did Bruce Nauman's bare-bones shacks, like Floating Room: Lit from Inside, 1972, constructed from wallboard and two-by-fours.
Musically, its 11 songs sport more arrangement and forethought than her 1996 bare-bones demo debut, Living With Ghosts, and the minimalistic Kisses, striking a nice middle ground between the starkness of those releases and the overwhelming fury of her anomalous 1998 rock foray, Flaming Red.
ORT Argentina has a budgetary shortfall of $6 million and urgently needs $1.5 million just to run its schools on a bare-bones basis in 2002.
"When I started as artistic director," he continues, "we had to cut back the budget to $5.7 million, which, for a company this size [thirty-two dancers and six apprentices] is very bare-bones. But we were looking at an accumulated deficit of $2.3 million.
However, there's both more and less to an electron than such a bare-bones description indicates.