Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Bureaucracy
/bjʊˈrɑːkrəsi/noun
Government by officials working through fixed rules and paperwork.
The Greek roots
κράτος
krátos
strength, grip on power
Literally: “rule by the writing desk”
Follow a root:κράτος20 words
The story of the word
Half French, half Greek. Vincent de Gournay coined bureaucratie around 1760 as a joke, a new form of government to set alongside democracy and aristocracy, bureau being the coarse cloth that covered a clerk's desk. English borrowed it in 1818 and the humour drained out within a generation. κράτος is raw strength rather than authority, which is why democracy means the people's grip on power, not their vote.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → French coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1818
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
democracyaristocracyautocrattheocracy
In a sentence
Two signatures should have taken a week; the bureaucracy took nine months.