🔊 Listen to the word Inchoate 

in-KOH-it

Definition

(adjective) Only partly formed or developed; not yet fully worked out or organized into a coherent whole.

Example

The business plan was still inchoate — more a collection of instincts and half-formed ambitions than anything a bank would recognize as a proposal.

Word Origin

Inchoate derives from the Latin incohare, meaning “to begin” or “to start work on” — from in- (“on”) and cohum, referring to the strap that attached a plow to a yoke. The original image is of a plow being hitched up — the moment just before work begins, when everything is in preparation but nothing has yet been done. It entered English in the 16th century, used in legal contexts to describe rights or claims that exist but have not yet been fully established, before expanding into its broader sense of anything begun but not yet complete.