- Mostly used in the south to describe, as an insult, a town or general area that is regarded as boring and lame and shouldn’t exist. Someplace where nothing exciting happens and everyday is the same.
Podunkville
noun; compounding
A small, generally irrelevant and dull, isolated town.
Etymology : 19th Century, emerged from the Algonquian word “Podunk” which was the name of the native people that inhabited a specific murky/boggy region and the name of the area they inhabited. The “Ville” morpheme is a modern french word that means city. It is often used for fictitious names of locations. The two words were combined most likely since podunk was a type of place no one wanted to live in so newspaper articles used it to poke fun at small boggy towns.
Source : “Where do you live, oh right podunkville” - Friend [~Nov 2020]
Last modified: 24 November 2020