Favoritism shown to relatives or close friends by those in power (as by giving them jobs)

Usage examples of nepotism.

The black community had been outraged over the articles, which enumerated the payoffs, deals, nepotism, and corruption that Duelly had been involved in.

After only a few months at Europol, Sanglier was familiar with the suspicion in which he was held by most of the other commissioners, who disdained his appointment as the nepotism of a legend.

All their wild claims about the corruption and nepotism of the traditional print unions would be vindicated by that one anonymous article.

Nepotism, fumed the Senate Democrats, but they confirmed the nomination anyway: Ludlow's credentials were as bluechip as his family connections and dividends from the family investment trusts.

In Milagro, this meant that since the last quarter of the nineteenth century most sheep ranchers had been serfs of the Devine Company, which, during the seventies and eighties, in one of those democratic and manifestly destined sleights of Horatio Alger's hand (involving a genteel and self-righteous sort of grand larceny, bribery, nepotism, murder, mayhem, and general all-around and all-American nefarious skulduggery), had managed to own outright, or secure the grazing rights to, all the property on the Jorge San-doval Land Grant in Chamisa County.

A wiry five-eight, graycropped, gray eyes back of horn-rims and heavy glass, cycling between preoccupation and near-frantic darting, he had had a way of verbalizing half-completed thoughts as he went along, so that you might begin to think him a representative of that tribe which had come into positions of small authority by means of nepotism or politics.

Knowing the only way to compete with nepotism was to make the weight, I punched bags, skipped meals and skipped rope until I was a nice, safe light heavyweight again.

Dean Langenfeld had gotten his job through nepotism, and that may have been true, but he didnt get to be the head of one of the most prestigious mental hospitals in the country without learning something about peoples idiosyncrasies.