podunk
/ˈpoʊdʌŋk/
podunk adjective: small, rural, and unimportant.
Adjective
podunk (comparative more podunk, superlative most podunk)
- Small, rural, and unimportant.
- "'A Super Bowl win can legitimize us as a town. We're not some small podunk town anymore,'" said Spencer Venable of Indianapolis.2007 February 5, “"We're not some podunk town anymore”, in USA Today
- Yes the beautiful time every year when this little podunk town [of Pendleton, Oregon] swells to four or five times her size with Round-Up feverish Cowboy types who chew, spit and chase four-legged critters around a screaming arena….check that….That’s normal…2010, “Round-Up Time: Pendleton Town Celebrates 100th!”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name), archived from the original on 10 Oct 2011
- Synonyms:
- backwater, boonies, drinkwater, jerkwater
Noun capitalized: Podunk
Podunk (plural Podunks)
- A member of a Native American people who spoke an Algonquian Quiripi language and lived primarily in modern-day Hartford County, Connecticut.
Proper noun capitalized: Podunk
Podunk
- A mythical small town of no importance.
- They even know it in Podunk, wherever that may be.1869, Mark Twain, Mr. Beecher and the Clergy
- Podunk. A term applied to an imaginary place in burlesque writing or speaking.[1877, John Russell Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms, 4th edition, page 791
- Synonyms:
- backwater, hog waller, hog island, hog town, jerkwater town, one-horse town
Synonyms of podunk
Forms of podunk
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more podunk |
| superlative | most podunk |
| Noun | |
| plural | Podunks |
| alternative form | podunk |
Origin of podunk
From Podunk, a mythical small town of no importance, from Eastern Algonquian.
From an Eastern Algonquian, likely Loup A, word or words. Similar names were applied to various small and generally unknown places. By the late 19th century the word came to mean an obscure small town, a use possibly popularized by Mark Twain (see quotation). Carlton and Reed survey similar place names and note a transformation from Potaecke to Potunke to Podunk. Carlton suggests a derivation from the adjective petukque ("round"). Tooker compares Ojibwe petobeg (“bog”) (as Chippewa) and Abenaki poteba (“to sink in the mire”) and divides the word into pot- ("to sink") and -unk (locative). Algonquian expert Ives Goddard says "We have no idea what the word means. You'll be able to find guesses in the sources if you look around. Don't believe any of it."
Questions about podunk
- What does podunk mean?
- Podunk means small, rural, and unimportant.
- What part of speech is podunk?
- Podunk can be an adjective, a noun or a proper noun.
- How do you pronounce podunk?
- Podunk is pronounced /ˈpoʊdʌŋk/.
Words near podunk in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: podunk (page history and authors); Podunk (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: “podunk.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/podunk. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.