The range of types of rule or government comprehended by English words with each ending is extremely broad, and I don't see any pattern in the choice of one or the other that offers a reliable basis for predicting which ending a new form is more likely to adopt. For example, a monarch (Greek monos, alone or single) is a sovereign head of state, in a type of government called monarchy.Īmong the words Quinion lists in a table headed " -cracy Government, rule, or influence," are these:Īristocracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, democracy, gerontocracy, meritocracy, mobocracy, plutocracy, theocracyĪmong the words that Quinion lists in a table headed " -archy Government or rule" are these:Īnarchy, autarchy, hierarchy, matriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, patriarchy, synarchyīecause many English speakers when presented with the suffix -archy may think first of monarchy and when presented with the suffix -cracy may think first of democracy, they may suppose that a stronger distinction exists between the tendencies of the two suffixes than actually exists. They correspond to nouns in -arch for a person or people who rule or command in that way. Words in -archy are abstract nouns for types of government, leadership, or social influence or organization. Government rule of a particular type a chief or ruler. Many forms ending in -cracy have been coined, though only a small number are at all well known most can mean either a system of influence or rule or a society o ruled, as with democracy, rule through elected representatives a few can also refer to the rulers as a group, as with aristocracy (Greek aristos, best), rule by members of the highest social class. cracy Also -crat, -cratic, and -cratical. Michael Quinion, Ologies and Isms: Word Beginnings and Endings (Oxford, 2002) has this to say about the suffixes: Today both -archy and -cracy are centrally associated with the idea of ruling. To learn more, see the privacy policy.According to Liddell & Scott, An Intermediate Greek–English Lexicon (1889), the root word κρατος ( kratos) in ancient Greek meant " strength, might"-and more generally, " power" or " rule, sway, sovereignty." The same lexicon reports that αρχη ( arche) meant "a beginning, origin, first cause," but also " the first place or power, sovereignty, dominion, command." The Greek roots thus have considerable overlap, but the connotations of αρχη may have included a stronger sense of hereditary or historical primacy than those of κρατος. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: Elastic Search, WordNet, and note that Reverse Dictionary uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. The definitions are sourced from the famous and open-source WordNet database, so a huge thanks to the many contributors for creating such an awesome free resource. In case you didn't notice, you can click on words in the search results and you'll be presented with the definition of that word (if available). For those interested, I also developed Describing Words which helps you find adjectives and interesting descriptors for things (e.g. So this project, Reverse Dictionary, is meant to go hand-in-hand with Related Words to act as a word-finding and brainstorming toolset. That project is closer to a thesaurus in the sense that it returns synonyms for a word (or short phrase) query, but it also returns many broadly related words that aren't included in thesauri. I made this tool after working on Related Words which is a very similar tool, except it uses a bunch of algorithms and multiple databases to find similar words to a search query. So in a sense, this tool is a "search engine for words", or a sentence to word converter. It acts a lot like a thesaurus except that it allows you to search with a definition, rather than a single word. The engine has indexed several million definitions so far, and at this stage it's starting to give consistently good results (though it may return weird results sometimes). For example, if you type something like "longing for a time in the past", then the engine will return "nostalgia". It simply looks through tonnes of dictionary definitions and grabs the ones that most closely match your search query. The way Reverse Dictionary works is pretty simple.
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