Modern colloquial use for actions that are sly, underhanded, or not playing fair. Often used in negative evaluations of someone's tactics.
Original meaning: a temporary measure or stopgap solution. Now rare and mostly replaced by the modern sense; still encountered in older texts or formal explanations.
You shouldn't use such underhanded methods.
His way of doing things is sneaky and untrustworthy.
That is nothing more than a stopgap measure.
姑息 literally means 'stopgap/makeshift' and is sometimes mistakenly used to mean 'petty' like せこい, but its core meaning is about temporary measures, not stinginess.
Standard kanji spelling; the reading こそく is the only one given.
Originally from Chinese, meaning a temporary or stopgap measure. In modern Japanese, the meaning shifted to 'underhanded' or 'sneaky', likely through association with petty, short-sighted tactics.