Aristocracy
/ˌærɪˈstɒkrəsi/noun
A hereditary noble class, or government by a privileged minority.
The Greek roots
Literally: “rule by the best”
The story of the word
For Aristotle, ἀριστοκρατία meant rule by the best-qualified and was the sound version of rule by the few; its corruption into rule by the merely rich was oligarchy, and keeping the two apart was the point of his classification. Ἄριστος is the superlative that sits inside Aristotle's own name and inside ἀριστεία, the stretch of an epic where a hero's excellence is on show. English took the word in the fifteenth century through French, and the hereditary-nobility sense, the only one left in ordinary use, arrived in the sixteenth.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 15th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
The land tax of 1910 did more damage to the English aristocracy than any revolution.