boondoggle
Other forms: boondoggling; boondoggles
A boondoggle is a useless, trivial piece of work — it's a waste of time. If you're serious about your career, you should avoid boondoggles.
Boondoggle is a silly sounding word for a silly project. Any endeavor that's a total waste of time or has no value could be called a boondoggle, especially if you're doing it just to look busy and important. The verb boondoggle means to do that useless work. If the mayor spends all his time promoting an eagle reserve in the middle of the Bronx instead of focusing on subway repairs, you could call that a boondoggle.
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work of little or no value done merely to look busytype of:dissipation, waste, wastefulnessuseless or profitless activity; using or expending or consuming thoughtlessly or carelessly
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do useless, wasteful, or trivial worktype of:workexert oneself by doing mental or physical work for a purpose or out of necessity
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The Story of "Boondoggle": A Useful Word for Useless Work
Vocabulary lists containing boondoggle
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Ben Zimmer is the executive producer of Vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus. He is language columnist for The Boston Globe and the former "On Language" columnist for The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press and as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary. He is also the chair of the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. We asked Ben, as an expert on the history of American English, to give us some of his favorite words that originated in the United States. "I'm fascinated by how the English language developed a unique American flavor (not flavour!) beginning in colonial times. I've been collecting examples of great contributions from American English. Here is a cornucopia of copacetic coinages from fertile American minds."