Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Despot
/ˈdɛspɑːt/noun
A ruler who holds absolute power and uses it oppressively.
The Greek roots
δεσπότης
despótēs
master of the house
Literally: “master of the house”
Follow a root:δεσπότης2 words
The story of the word
δεσπότης is domestic before it is political: the man with power over the slaves in a household, built from an old word for house plus a root meaning power. Byzantium promoted it into an honorific, and by the fourteenth century a despotēs governed a province with the emperor's authority. The word only turned poisonous in eighteenth-century French political argument, and English took that sense in the 1790s.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
despotismdespotic
In a sentence
Every constitution in the room had been written by someone frightened of a despot.