ascendancy
English
Alternative forms
Etymology
ascend + -ancy or ascendant + -cy. The use in ecology is due to Robert Ulanowicz.
Noun
ascendancy (countable and uncountable, plural ascendancies)
- Supremacy; dominant control; the quality of being in the ascendant.
- Synonym: superiority
- 2011 January 15, Phil McNulty, “Tottenham 0 - 0 Man Utd”, in BBC[1]:
- Spurs ended the half in the ascendancy and Van der Vaart was again inches away from giving them the lead when he met Bale's cross but his header flew wide.
- 2018 July 18, Owen Jones, “The hard right can only be defeated from the left, not from the centre”, in The Guardian[2]:
- The Tory hard right is in the ascendancy, and a fascist street movement – led by convicted fraudster Tommy Robinson – represents a growing threat.
- (historical, Ireland, sometimes capitalized) A class of Protestant landowners and professionals that dominated political and social life in Ireland up to the early 20th century
- 1975, Terry Eagleton, New Left Review:
- [W. B. Yeats] belonged not to the ascendancy class but to the protestant bourgeoisie.
- 1975, Terry Eagleton, New Left Review:
- (ecology) A quantitative attribute of an ecosystem, defined as a function of the ecosystem's trophic network, and intended to indicate its ability to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size. [from 1986]
Derived terms
Related terms
Translations
supremacy; superiority; dominant control
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Further reading
- Protestant Ascendancy on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
- ascendency (ecology) on Wikipedia.Wikipedia