Word.ws English Dictionary

pork barrels

pork barrels is the plural of pork barrel.

Meaning of pork barrel

Noun

pork barrel (plural pork barrels)

  1. (archaic) A barrel used to store pork.
  2. (US) A ready supply of income; one's livelihood.
  3. (US, attributive, often) State funds as assigned for local or regional expenditure; especially, central money used for regional projects which are eyecatching or designed to appeal to voters.
    • As the President said in his veto message, "It should also come as no surprise that over time the program has attained distinct flavor of pork barrel."1973 April 10, James T. Lynn, “Pork-Barrel Waste”, in The New York Times

Questions about pork barrels

What is pork barrels the plural of?
Pork barrels is the plural of pork barrel.

Words near pork barrels in the dictionary

  1. pork and bean
  2. pork and beans
  3. Pork and Beans War
  4. pork barrel
  5. pork barrelling
  6. pork barrels
  7. pork bellies
  8. pork belly
  9. pork butcher
  10. pork butchers
  11. pork cheese

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pork barrels (page history and authors); pork barrel (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: “pork barrels.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pork_barrels. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.