Word.ws English Dictionary

pork-barrelling

pork-barrelling noun: the practice of giving favours or money to voters in connection with a candidate for a current or future election, in order to sway enough voters so that the candidate will win.

Noun

pork-barrelling (uncountable)

  1. The practice of giving favours or money to voters in connection with a candidate for a current or future election, in order to sway enough voters so that the candidate will win.
  2. The practice of an elected politician giving favours or money to some or all voters in the politician's electorate, or to certain organizations, as compensation or payback for support from those voters or organizations in the past.

Forms of pork-barrelling

alternative formpork barrelling
alternative formporkbarreling
alternative formpork-barreling

Origin of pork-barrelling

From pork barrel + -ing.

Questions about pork-barrelling

What does pork-barrelling mean?
Pork-barrelling means the practice of giving favours or money to voters in connection with a candidate for a current or future election, in order to sway enough voters so that the candidate will win.
What part of speech is pork-barrelling?
Pork-barrelling is a noun.

Words near pork-barrelling in the dictionary

  1. pork up
  2. pork Wellington
  3. pork Wellingtons
  4. pork-barrel
  5. pork-barreling
  6. pork-barrelling
  7. pork-barrels
  8. pork-cat syndrome
  9. pork-chop island
  10. pork-chop islands
  11. pork-knocker

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pork-barrelling (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.

Last updated:

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