Highly monodispersed ZnO nanorods have been synthesized by the hydrothermal approach with polyacrylamide (PAM) as the template and zinc acetate as the zinc source. Most of these synthesized ZnO rods have diameters of 30 nm~200 nm and lengths of 80 nm~15 μm. The structural characterization of ZnO nanorods was carried out by XRD, TG, FTIR, TEM and SEM. nanoZnO rods can be prepared merely by one step reaction using little template. It indicated that this method can be applied to the commercialization of rod-like ZnO preparation technology.