Podunk Definition & Meaning

American

Etymology

Examples

Podunk American [poh-duhngk] / ˈpoʊ dʌŋk /

noun

1. any small and insignificant or inaccessible town or village.

   After a year in the big city, I was ready to move back to Podunk.

Etymology

Origin of Podunk

1660–70, generic use of Podunk, village near Hartford, Conn.

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Lucius has a knack for showmanship, with moves he stole from Maximus, but he’s more feral, going tooth-to-tooth with a nasty baboon in a podunk ring outside the city.

From Los Angeles Times

It's like the band of Robin Hood people broke into this basically podunk office of the FBI, right?

From Salon

Cao later told podcast host Alec Lace that he did nothing illegal and that the story was published by a “podunk local newspaper.”

From Seattle Times

When Joan Monteillet was growing up here in the 1960s, she said, “it was just a Podunk town surrounded by wheat farms.”

From Washington Post

A lot of people said seeing us on “Saturday Night Live,” they felt comfortable with themselves, finally, even though they might live in some Podunk town where tolerance is, forget it.

From New York Times

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.