Chieftaincy

//ˈtʃiːftənsi// noun

noun ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The position or period of rule of a chief.

    "At first Matenge had hated his brother because he felt the chieftaincy should be his, and this hatred drove him to overreach himself until he was discovered in a plot to assassinate his brother."

  2. 2
    the position of chieftain wordnet
  3. 3
    The area or population ruled by a chief.

    "And it does not help that the lowermost part of Broadway was originally laid out as a footpath by the people of the Wickquasgeck chieftaincy, long before Europeans arrived."

Example

More examples

"At first Matenge had hated his brother because he felt the chieftaincy should be his, and this hatred drove him to overreach himself until he was discovered in a plot to assassinate his brother."

Etymology

From chieftain + -cy. Piecewise doublet of captaincy.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.