Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Patriarchy
/ˈpeɪtriɑːrki/noun
A social system in which men hold authority and descent or property runs through the male line.
The Greek roots
πατριά
patriá
lineage, clan
ἀρχή
arkhḗ
rule, command
Literally: “rule of the lineage-head”
The story of the word
The Greek πατριάρχης meant the head of a clan, and the Septuagint translators used it for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, which is how the eastern churches got patriarchs of their own. English took the word in the 1560s for exactly that ecclesiastical sense: a patriarchy was the territory a church patriarch governed. Anthropologists borrowed it in the nineteenth century for kinship systems, and second-wave feminism made the modern meaning the dominant one within a decade.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → English
- First recorded
- 1560s
Same family
patriarchmatriarchymonarchyanarchyhierarchy
In a sentence
The inheritance rules were the clearest evidence of patriarchy in the village records.