Democrat

How to spell democrat

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce democrat

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does democrat mean?

1. nounA person who believes in or advocates government by the whole population, typically through elected representatives.
2. nounA member or supporter of the Democratic Party in the United States.

Democrat in a sentence

• As a lifelong democrat, she argued that every adult should have an equal vote.

• The senator, a veteran democrat, has represented her state for three terms.

• The reformer was a committed democrat who opposed any form of hereditary rule.

• The district has reliably elected a democrat in every recent congressional race.

Where does democrat come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes ultimately from the Greek demokratia, meaning 'rule by the people', which joined demos, the ordinary people of a city or state, with kratos, meaning 'power' or 'strength'. English took the personal form not directly from Greek but through the French democrate, a term that became politically charged during the French Revolution of the late 1700s, when it described someone who favoured government by the whole people rather than by a king or a privileged few. The word entered English around that same period and originally carried a faintly radical or revolutionary flavour. The same demos root sits inside 'demography' and 'epidemic', while the kratos root powers 'autocrat', 'aristocrat' and 'bureaucrat'. The spelling trap is the unstressed middle vowel: writers reaching for the sound may guess 'demacrat' or 'democrate', but the o of demo- and the bare -crat ending are both fixed.

How the word is built

• demo- (from Greek demos: the common people)
• -crat (from kratos: power, rule)