[with object] US informal
Make or repair (an object) in an improvised or inventive way, making use of whatever items are at hand:
‘he MacGyvered a makeshift jack with a log’
‘he has a shock of short red hair and a pair of rectangular-framed glasses MacGyvered with duct tape’.
Give it up for the gang at Oxford Dictionaries: No longer making us wait 75 years for the next fully updated edition to come out in hardcover, they’re regularly adding new words fizzing through social media. Just this month, the Oxford crew added up-to-the-minute lingo like “manspreading,” “SJW,” “Redditor” and “MacGyver.”
Wait — MacGyver? This is the 1989 update, right?
No, on Aug. 27, 2015, the Oxford Dictionaries site finally did right by MacGyver and decreed that it was a verb: To make or repair (an object) in an improvised or inventive way, making use of whatever items are at hand. Between 1985 and 1992, MacGyver aired on either Sunday or Monday nights on ABC, always highlighting the ingenious ability of mullet-headed secret agent Angus MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) to find his way out of a jam using everyday objects — defusing a bomb with a paper clip, using binoculars to deflect a laser beam, etc. [from Kyle Smith, New York Post, August 27, 2015]
McGyver, works as a troubleshooter for the fictional Phoenix Foundation in Los Angeles and as an agent for a fictional United States government agency, the Department of External Services (DXS). Educated as a scientist, MacGyver served as a Bomb Team Technician/EOD during the Vietnam War. Resourceful and possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the physical sciences, he solves complex problems by making things out of ordinary objects, along with his ever-present Swiss Army knife. He prefers non-violent resolutions and prefers not to handle a gun.
Other exemplifying sentences:
‘An hour after we headed out to sea, Toby had remedied our predicament by MacGyvering a replacement from plumbing parts and rope’.
‘She mastered the at of MacGyvering some clothes out of whatever you can steal from somebody else’s tent’.
‘I know you’re laughing, but you have no idea how many things I’ve “MacGyvered” with paper clips’.
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