Bureaucracy

How to spell bureaucracy

11 letters · 4 syllables

5 of the 23 people asked to spell bureaucracy in Spelling Garden got it wrong the first time.

How to pronounce bureaucracy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bureaucracy mean?

1. nounA system of government or administration run by officials following complex rules and procedures, often seen as excessively rigid or slow.

Bureaucracy in a sentence

• Getting a permit involves a lot of bureaucracy.

• Cutting through the bureaucracy takes patience.

• Some bureaucracy is necessary in a large organisation.

Where does bureaucracy come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the French bureau, which originally meant the coarse woollen cloth (called bure) used to cover writing desks, and then came to mean the desk itself and later the office where officials worked. To this the French economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay added the Greek suffix -kratia, from kratos meaning 'rule' or 'power', the same element found in democracy and aristocracy. The hybrid French coinage bureaucratie was meant, somewhat mockingly, to describe government by office desks, that is, rule by officials rather than elected leaders. English borrowed it in the early nineteenth century, keeping the French -eau spelling that traps so many writers. The unusual cluster of vowels in 'eau' followed by 'cracy' is exactly why the word is so often misspelled, since it joins a French stem to a Greek ending.

How the word is built

• bureau (writing desk, office)
• -cracy (rule, government, from Greek kratos: power)