hierarchy
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Middle English ierarchie, jerarchie, from Old French ierarchie, jerarchie, from Late Latin ierarchia, from Latin hierarchia, from Ancient Greek ἱεραρχία (hierarkhía, “rule of a high priest”), from ἱεράρχης (hierárkhēs, “high priest”), from ἱερός (hierós, “holy”) + ἄρχω (árkhō, “I rule”). The H was re-added c. 1500 due to influence from Classical Latin.
Pronunciation
[edit]Noun
[edit]hierarchy (plural hierarchies)
- A body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks.
- 2007 May 26, Leslie Feinberg, “Care & prevention, not repression”, in Workers World[1]:
- Gay men and bisexuals were blamed for the [AIDS] epidemic for much the same reason that the church hierarchy in the Middle Ages accused Jewish people of creating bubonic plague by "poisoning the wells."
- 2013 August 10, Lexington, “Keeping the mighty honest”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848:
- The [Washington] Post's proprietor through those turbulent [Watergate] days, Katharine Graham, held a double place in Washington’s hierarchy: at once regal Georgetown hostess and scrappy newshound, ready to hold the establishment to account.
- A social, religious, economic or political system or organization in which people or groups of people are ranked with some superior to others based on their status, authority or some other trait.
- 2023 June 7, Charles Hugh Smith, Look Around and What Do You See? Social Defeat[2]:
- Social defeat arises in strict social hierarchies in which the few dominate the many. Overcrowding exacerbates the many ills of social defeat within these social hierarchies based on dominance.
- Any group of objects ranked so that every one but the topmost is subordinate to a specified one above it.
- 2017 June 1, Peter Mark Adams, The Game of Saturn: Decoding the Sola-Busca Tarocchi, Scarlet Imprint, →ISBN, page 158:
- ... the surviving portions provide enough detail to outline its principal features: the hierarchy of beings to whom his liturgy was to be addressed (we previously considered Plethon's hierarchy of gods in our examination of his Summary […]
Derived terms
[edit]Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]body of authoritative officials organised by rank
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class of objects
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