Politics & SocietyGreek → English
Technocracy
/tɛkˈnɒkrəsi/noun
Government run by technical experts rather than by elected politicians.
The Greek roots
τέχνη
tékhnē
craft, skill
κράτος
krátos
power, rule
Literally: “rule by skill”
The story of the word
William Henry Smyth, a Californian engineer, coined the word in 1919 in the journal Industrial Management. A movement took the name in the early 1930s and proposed replacing money with energy certificates measured in joules. τέχνη covered carpentry, navigation and medicine alike: any practice with rules that can be taught.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1919
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
technologytechniquedemocracyaristocracy
In a sentence
Critics called the new budget office a technocracy answerable to nobody.