Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Matriarchy
/ˈmeɪtriɑːrki/noun
A social system in which women hold authority and descent runs through the female line.
The Greek roots
ἀρχή
arkhḗ
rule, command
Literally: “rule of the mother”
Follow a root:ἀρχή11 words
The story of the word
Half Latin, half Greek: mater was welded onto the Greek -archy already sitting inside patriarchy, and purists complained about the mongrel for decades. Greek would have made it μητριαρχία from μήτηρ. The word appeared in English in the 1880s, after Bachofen's Mutterrecht of 1861 convinced a generation of anthropologists that mother-rule was an early stage every society passed through, a claim the evidence has not supported.
- How it travelled
- Latin + Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1880s
Same family
patriarchymonarchyoligarchyarchive
In a sentence
Anthropologists distinguish matriarchy from matrilineal descent, and most reported cases turn out to be the second.