shovel-ready
See also: shovel ready
English
Alternative forms
- shovel ready
Etymology
First used by Barack Obama during an interview with Meet the Press on 6 December 2008.
Adjective
shovel-ready (comparative more shovel-ready, superlative most shovel-ready)
- (Of a building project) ready for immediate commencement of excavation and construction.
- 2003, Urban Land Institute, Urban Land, volume 62, number 7-12, page 44:
- LCDC officials emphasize that the need for shovel-ready industrial sites in this case outweighs the goal of preserving prime farmland.
- 2009, Jennifer Lewington, "Battle brews over ‘shovel ready’ projects," The Globe and Mail (Toronto), Jan 15, p. A12:
- With an eye to the imminent federal budget, Toronto business and civic leaders are set today to name $4.8-billion in "shovel-ready" projects that would stimulate the flagging local economy.
- 2020 May 20, “Network News: Mayor urges funding advance”, in Rail, page 13:
- He wants the money injected into major infrastructure schemes and claims there are "several shovel-ready schemes just awaiting funding".
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- (by extension) Describing a project which is a candidate for economic stimulus spending, the one having a more immediate impact on the economy as opposed to the project requiring a great deal of time that must elapse for architecture, zoning, legal considerations or other factors before labor can be deployed on it.
Further reading
shovel-ready on Wikipedia.Wikipedia - “shovel-ready”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.