Word.ws English Dictionary

featherbedding

featherbedding is the present participle and gerund of featherbed.

Meaning of featherbed

Verb

featherbed (third-person singular simple present featherbeds, present participle featherbedding, simple past and past participle featherbedded)

  1. (transitive) To treat someone with excessive indulgence; to pamper, cosset or mollycoddle.
  2. (intransitive) To engage in featherbedding; to employ more workers than necessary to fulfill a labor union requirement.

See all 5 meanings of featherbed

Noun

featherbedding (uncountable)

  1. (US) The employment of more workers than is necessary, typically because of labor union rules (or sometimes deals with organized crime, a government, etc), especially upon the introduction of new technology.
    • It [Pemex, Mexico's state-owned petroleum company] eventually grew bigger than Gazprom, the Russian state oil company, but it has always had a problem with internal malfeasance and featherbedding. “Corporate governance is poor,” says Duncan Wood, head of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center....2019, Seth Harp, “Blood and Oil”, in Rolling Stone
    • Two factors made the Ministry untenable; private industry considered the featherbedding of the public sector to be unfair competition. Since the DC depends on private industry for much of its support, continuing the practice would have compromised this support.2020 September 11, James Walston, The Mafia and Clientelism: Roads to Rome in Post-War Calabria, Routledge, →ISBN

Questions about featherbedding

What does featherbedding mean?
Featherbedding means the employment of more workers than is necessary, typically because of labor union rules (or sometimes deals with organized crime, a government, etc), especially upon the introduction of new technology.
What is featherbedding the present participle and gerund of?
Featherbedding is the present participle and gerund of featherbed.
What part of speech is featherbedding?
Featherbedding is a noun.

Words near featherbedding in the dictionary

  1. featherable
  2. featherback
  3. featherbacks
  4. featherbed
  5. featherbedded
  6. featherbedding
  7. featherbeds
  8. featherbells
  9. featherblade
  10. featherblades
  11. featherboard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: featherbedding (page history and authors); featherbed (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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Cite this entry: “featherbedding.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/featherbedding. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.