postcode lottery
Syllables: post·code lot·te·ry/ˌpəʊs(t)kəʊd ˈlɒtəɹi/US/ˌpoʊs(t)ˌkoʊd ˈlɑtɚi/
postcode lottery noun: the unequal availability or quality of services, especially public services such as healthcare or education, in different parts of the country.
Noun
postcode lottery (plural postcode lotteries)
- The unequal availability or quality of services, especially public services such as healthcare or education, in different parts of the country.
- There is a National Institute for Clinical Excellence which is working its way through examining drugs and treatments and dictating what treatment and drugs should be used across the country to prevent the postcode lottery of previous years.1998, Talking Politics, London: The Politics Association, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 138, column 3
- The Audit Commission has described the situation facing householders as a ‘postcode lottery’ but there is a discernible trend. You are more likely to receive poorer environmental services living in an urban authority than you are living in a shire district.1999, “Managing the Urban Environment”, in Towards an Urban Renaissance: Final Report of the Urban Task Force Chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside (Taylor & Francis e-Library), London: Office of the...
Examples of postcode lottery in a sentence
- People were angry about the postcode lottery in the NHS [National Health Service], or that this school is better than that school and I can't get into the good school.2001, Polly Toynbee (discussant), “A Roundtable Discussion on the Prospects for a Progressive Century”, in Neal Lawson, Neil Sherlock...
- A Briton's chance of finding a good school, or effective treatment for a medical condition, or any kind of NHS dentist, may depend on the ‘postcode lottery’.2003, Bill Coxall, Lynton Robins, Robert Leach, “Politics, Democracy and Power”, in Contemporary British Politics, 4th edition...
- So there is good reason to believe that the postcode lottery will continue even in situations of ostensible central control.2020, Stephen Muers, “Doing More Locally”, in Culture and Values at the Heart of Policy Making: An Insider’s Guide, Bristol: Policy Press...
- A postcode lottery in cancer care means more than one-fifth of patients with cancerous tumours wait longer than two months to have them removed in some parts of England, Labour has claimed.2023 August 27, Caroline Davies, “Labour blames postcode lottery in cancer care in England for delays”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
Forms of postcode lottery
| plural | postcode lotteries |
|---|
Origin of postcode lottery
From postcode (“a sequence of letters and numbers added to a postal address to aid the sorting and delivery of post or mail; a region denoted by a postcode”) + lottery (“something decided by chance”), referring to the fact that whether one is in a locality which receives adequate services is a matter of chance.
Questions about postcode lottery
- What does postcode lottery mean?
- Postcode lottery means the unequal availability or quality of services, especially public services such as healthcare or education, in different parts of the country.
- How do you use postcode lottery in a sentence?
- People were angry about the postcode lottery in the NHS [National Health Service], or that this school is better than that school and I can't get into the good school.
- What part of speech is postcode lottery?
- Postcode lottery is a noun.
- How do you pronounce postcode lottery?
- Postcode lottery is pronounced /ˌpəʊs(t)kəʊd ˈlɒtəɹi/ (UK).
- What is the plural of postcode lottery?
- The plural of postcode lottery is postcode lotteries.
Words near postcode lottery in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: postcode lottery (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:
Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-postcode lottery.wav.
Cite this entry: “postcode lottery.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/postcode_lottery. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.