Oligarch
//ˈɒlɪˌɡɑːk// noun
noun ·Uncommon ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A member of an oligarchy; someone who is part of a small group that runs a country.
- 2 one of the rulers in an oligarchy wordnet
- 3 A very wealthy business owner who wields political power.
"Millions of people were starving, while the oligarchs and their supporters were surfeiting on the surplus."
- 4 A protoplanet formed during oligarchic accretion.
"In the inner Solar System, only the asteroid Ceres was able to grow fast enough to become a dwarf planet, but in the outer Solar System huge numbers of icy bodies formed, ranging from pebbles to the oligarchs now recognized as dwarf planets."
Example
More examples"Algeria's oligarch Ali Haddad was detained in April 2019."
Etymology
From French oligarque, olygarche, from Late Latin oligarcha, from Ancient Greek ὀλιγάρχης (oligárkhēs). By surface analysis, olig- (“few”) + -arch (“ruler, leader”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.