1 Definition
To redraw the boundaries of voting districts in a way that gives one party or group an unfair advantage.
2 In Use
Critics argued the new map had been gerrymandered so skillfully that the outcome felt settled before a single ballot was cast.
3 Word Origin
Gerry Eng. · governor's surname → salamandra Gk. · a lizard → gerrymander 19th c. American English
Gerrymander is a deliberate mash-up, joining the surname of Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry with the tail end of salamander, a word that came into English through Latin from Greek. It appeared in 1812, when a Boston newspaper printed a cartoon of a strangely contorted state senate district that looked like a winged lizard. The joke stuck so well that a political jab became an everyday term, and it soon grew from a noun for the odd-shaped district into a verb for the maneuver itself.
💡Fun Fact
Elbridge Gerry was no minor figure. He signed the Declaration of Independence and later served as Vice President under James Madison. Ironically, historians note that Gerry was reportedly uneasy about the districting bill that made his name infamous, yet his name is the one history attached to it. Pronunciation has its own quirk: many people say the first syllable with a soft J, while Gerry's own surname is generally said to have been pronounced with a hard G, as in "gary." Either version is now widely accepted in modern speech.