Prefecture
noun ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 The office or position of a prefect.
- 2 the office of prefect wordnet
- 3 The jurisdiction of a prefect; the region administered by a prefect, especially as a translation of certain French, Chinese, and Japanese administrative divisions.
"The top anti-corruption watchdog in Southwest China’s Yunnan province said on Friday the governor of the burgeoning aluminium hub of Wenshan had been placed under investigation. Zhang Xiulan, who has been governor of Wenshan prefecture since March 2015, is suspected of “grave violations of discipline and the law,” the Yunnan Province Commission for Discipline Inspection said in a statement, without elaborating."
- 4 the district administered by a prefect (as in France or Japan or the Roman Empire) wordnet
Example
More examples"The village which I visited last summer was a small one in Nagano Prefecture."
Etymology
Borrowed from Middle French préfecture, from Latin praefectūra. Equivalent to prefect + -ure. As an East Asian administrative division, a calque of Chinese 府 (fǔ) and 郡 (jùn), also used to describe 縣 /县 (xian, “county”) and 州 (zhou, “province”) in some eras.
Related phrases
More for "prefecture"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.