Word.ws English Dictionary

government stroke

government stroke noun: the deliberately slow pace of work supposed to be typical of government workers.

Noun

government stroke

  1. (Australia, slang) The deliberately slow pace of work supposed to be typical of government workers.
    • Why not just leave things as they are and say, "We are going to run this government organisation efficiently; we are going to make sure that the government stroke has disappeared, that the managers are on the ball and that the customers get good service".1991 December 2, Donald Bowman, debate before the New South Wales Legislative Assembly
  2. (Australia, historical, obsolete, slang) The amount work that a convict was required to complete each day.

Questions about government stroke

What does government stroke mean?
Government stroke means the deliberately slow pace of work supposed to be typical of government workers.
What part of speech is government stroke?
Government stroke is a noun.

Words near government stroke in the dictionary

  1. government note
  2. government notes
  3. government shutdown
  4. government shutdowns
  5. government spending
  6. government stroke
  7. government take
  8. government takes
  9. government trophies
  10. government trophy
  11. government wharf

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: government stroke (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: EN-AU ck1 government stroke.ogg.

Cite this entry: “government stroke.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/government_stroke. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.