Dictator

How to spell dictator

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce dictator

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dictator mean?

1. nounA ruler who holds total power, usually seized or kept by force and without genuine elections.

Dictator in a sentence

• The dictator banned all opposition parties and controlled the press.

• The country celebrated when the ageing dictator was finally driven from power.

Where does dictator come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin dictator, an agent noun built on dictare, meaning 'to say repeatedly' or 'to dictate', which itself is a frequentative form of dicere, 'to say' or 'to speak'. In the Roman Republic a dictator was originally not a tyrant at all but a magistrate granted absolute power for a strictly limited emergency, often only six months, after which the authority lapsed. English took the word over in the late 1300s, keeping the Latin spelling and the sense of one who issues commands that must be obeyed, and over time the meaning hardened into the modern idea of an oppressive absolute ruler. The same dicere root surfaces in a whole family of everyday words such as 'dictate', 'dictionary', 'predict', 'verdict' and 'contradict', all turning on the idea of saying or declaring. That shared -dict- spine is the easiest way to lock in the spelling, since the trap is the unstressed ending, which is -ator rather than -ater.

How the word is built

• dict- (from dicere: to say, speak, declare)
• -ator (agent noun suffix: one who does)