Confederacy
name, noun ·Moderate ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 An alliance.
- 2 a secret agreement between two or more people to perform an unlawful act wordnet
- 3 A state where the sovereign constituent units delegate their authority to the centre. As opposed to a federation, where the central and regional governments are each equal and sovereign in their own sphere.
- 4 a group of conspirators banded together to achieve some harmful or illegal purpose wordnet
- 5 Specifically, an instance of a decentralized governing structure among the indigenous peoples of North America.
"The Blackfoot, Iroquois, and Sioux peoples all were governed as confederacies. There were also multi-ethnic confederacies, such as the Iron Confederacy made up of the Plains Cree, Assiniboine, Stoney, and Saulteaux."
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- 6 a union of political organizations wordnet
- 1 The Confederate States of America, the collection of American states that seceded from the United States in 1860–61, and fought against the Union in the American Civil War. historical
"Christmas of 1862 had been a happy one for Atlanta, for the whole South. The Confederacy had scored a smashing victory at Fredericksburg and the Yankee dead and wounded were counted in the thousands."
Antonyms
All antonymsExample
More examples"The Maratha Empire could just as easily be called the Maratha Confederacy."
Etymology
From Middle English confederacie, from Anglo-Norman confederacie, from Latin cōnfoederātiō. Doublet of confederation.
Related phrases
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.