Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Gerontocracy
/ˌdʒɛrənˈtɒkrəsi/noun
Government by the elderly, or a state in which the old hold power.
The Greek roots
γέρων
gérōn
old man
κράτος
krátos
power, rule
Literally: “rule by old men”
The story of the word
Sparta ran one for real: the gerousia was a council of twenty-eight men over sixty, elected for life, who prepared everything the assembly voted on. The English word arrives in the early nineteenth century, usually as a complaint. Geriatric shares the root and was coined much later, in 1909, by the physician Ignatz Nascher.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
geriatricgerontologydemocracyaristocracy
In a sentence
Commentators called the late Soviet Politburo a gerontocracy and left it there.
A senate with a median age of seventy invites the word.