Word.ws English Dictionary

favor bank

favor bank noun: a notional bank where favors (acts of goodwill in a relationship) are tallied up.

Noun

favor bank

  1. A notional bank where favors (acts of goodwill in a relationship) are tallied up.
    • “You ever hear of the Favor Bank?”
    • “The Favor Bank? No.”
    • “Well, everything in this building, everything in the criminal justice system in New York”—New Yawk—“operates on favors. Everybody does favors for everybody else. Every chance they get, they make deposits in the Favor Bank.[…]1987, Tom Wolfe, “The Favor Bank”, in The Bonfire of the Vanities, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, →ISBN, page 384

Examples of favor bank in a sentence

  • What is this Favor Bank?’ ‘It was an American writer who first mentioned it.[2005, Paulo Coelho, The Zahir, Harper Perennial, →ISBN:
  • Tom Hopkins, the well-known sales trainer and author, calls this the favor bank in How to Master the Art of Selling (1982).[2010, Joel Gendelman, Consulting Basics, American Society for Training and Development, →ISBN, page 140:
  • Founders in a crisis call Altman first, relying on his knack for high-speed trading in the Valley’s favor bank[…]2016 October 3, Tad Friend, “Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny”, in The New Yorker:

Origin of favor bank

Popularized in The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987).

Questions about favor bank

What does favor bank mean?
Favor bank means a notional bank where favors (acts of goodwill in a relationship) are tallied up.
How do you use favor bank in a sentence?
What is this Favor Bank?’ ‘It was an American writer who first mentioned it.
What part of speech is favor bank?
Favor bank is a noun.

Words near favor bank in the dictionary

  1. favomancy
  2. favonian
  3. Favonius
  4. favoprotein
  5. favor
  6. favor bank
  7. favor'd
  8. favorabilities
  9. favorability
  10. favorable
  11. favorableness

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: favor bank (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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