bureaucrat
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Etymology tree
From French bureaucrate, equivalent to bureau + -crat.
Pronunciation
[edit]- (Received Pronunciation) IPA(key): /ˈbjʊəɹəkɹæt/
Audio (Southern England): (file) - (General American) IPA(key): /ˈbjʊɹəkɹæt/
- Hyphenation: bu‧reau‧crat
Noun
[edit]bureaucrat (plural bureaucrats)
- An official who is part of a bureaucracy.
- 2025 February 7, Josie Ensor, “Meet Elon Musk’s ‘baby-faced assassins’ leading Doge takeover”, in The Times[1], archived from the original on 27 January 2026:
- Coristine, who had signed onto the telemeeting using a non-government email address, gave the bureaucrats swift marching orders, telling them he needed access to the federal department’s contract and payment systems before reportedly making them justify their jobs at the $1 billion-budget administration.
- 2025 February 14, Marshall Cohen, “The almighty Musk: How the world’s richest man became Washington’s most powerful bureaucrat”, in CNN[2], archived from the original on 21 February 2025:
- At the Oval Office signing ceremony, Musk responded to critiques that he’s become the very thing he claims to be fighting — an unelected bureaucrat with enormous power — by pointing to the 2024 results: “You couldn’t ask for a stronger mandate from the public.”
- (wiki jargon) A user on a wiki with the right to change user access levels.
- 2014, Pnina Fichman, Noriko Hara, editors, Global Wikipedia: International and Cross-Cultural Issues in Online Collaboration, Rowman & Littlefield, →ISBN, page 18:
- One of three major processes is generally used: a bureaucrat review, a broader community review, or an approvals group review. As only local bureaucrats or Wikimedia stewards can grant the bot flag necessary to operate an authorized bot, the simplest method is to appeal directly to these individuals.
Usage notes
[edit]The term bureaucrat, while often used in a professional and respectful manner, is oftentimes disdained by those who work in organizations, especially governmental organizations. This is due to connotations of rigidity, indifference, and especially laziness that the term can sometimes connote (the latter especially reflected in the oft-repeated derisive term lazy bureaucrat). As a result, many workers in organizations, especially governmental ones, prefer terms such as manager, public manager, civil servant, public servant, public official, etc.
Synonyms
[edit]Derived terms
[edit]Related terms
[edit]Translations
[edit]an official in a bureaucracy
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Categories:
- English terms derived from Proto-Hellenic
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European word *péh₂wr̥
- English terms derived from Proto-Indo-European
- English terms derived from French
- English terms borrowed from French
- English terms derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *kret- (strong)
- English terms derived from Ancient Greek
- English terms derived from Old French
- English terms derived from Proto-Italic
- English terms derived from Latin
- English terms suffixed with -crat
- English 3-syllable words
- English terms with IPA pronunciation
- English terms with audio pronunciation
- English lemmas
- English nouns
- English countable nouns
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