ascendancy

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English

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Alternative forms

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Etymology

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From ascend +‎ -ancy or ascendant +‎ -cy. The use in ecology is due to Robert Ulanowicz.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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ascendancy (countable and uncountable, plural ascendancies)

  1. The quality of being in the ascendant; dominant control, supremacy.
    Synonyms: ascendant, 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.
  2. (historical, Ireland, sometimes capitalized) Ellipsis of Protestant Ascendancy, 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.
    • 2017, John Gibney, “The Age of O'Connell”, in A Short History of Ireland, 1500–2000, New Haven: Yale University Press, →ISBN:
      True, the “ascendancy” remained a crucial and significant governing class in Irish life, and would remain so for generations.
  3. (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]
    • 2009, Sven Erik Jørgensen, editor, Ecosystem Ecology, Academic Press, →ISBN, page 63:
      Ascendency was found to be a useful indicator for the health assessment of marine benthic ecosystems over space and time.

Derived terms

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