Word.ws English Dictionary

yesmanship

yesmanship noun: an atmosphere in which people claim to agree with leadership for political reasons, despite holding other opinions privately.

Noun

yesmanship (uncountable)

  1. An atmosphere in which people claim to agree with leadership for political reasons, despite holding other opinions privately.
    • Like corruption, yesmanship also pervades the Indian bureaucracy. -Brij Mohan Sharma, K. R. Bombwall, L. P. Choudhry
  2. The state of being a yes man.
    • He chose his lieutenants for their yesmanship and promoted according to political loyalty, not seniority or merit. -Dennis Bloodworth

Synonyms of yesmanship

Origin of yesmanship

From yesman + -ship.

Questions about yesmanship

What does yesmanship mean?
Yesmanship means an atmosphere in which people claim to agree with leadership for political reasons, despite holding other opinions privately.
What part of speech is yesmanship?
Yesmanship is a noun.

Words near yesmanship in the dictionary

  1. Yeskes
  2. yesking
  3. yesks
  4. yesman
  5. yesmanism
  6. yesmanship
  7. yesmen
  8. yesn't
  9. Yeso
  10. Yessabah
  11. yessah

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: yesmanship (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: “yesmanship.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/yesmanship. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.