Emperor

How to spell emperor

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce emperor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does emperor mean?

1. nounA male sovereign who rules an empire, ranking above a king.

Emperor in a sentence

• The emperor ruled over a vast territory spanning three continents.

• Historians still debate how the emperor managed to hold so many provinces together.

Where does emperor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word goes back to the Latin imperator, which literally meant 'commander' or 'one who gives orders', built on the verb imperare, 'to command'. In republican Rome imperator began as an honorary military title bestowed on a victorious general by his troops, and only later, under Augustus and his successors, did it harden into the title for the supreme ruler of the Roman state. English took the word in the 1200s through Old French empereor, which had worn the Latin form down considerably, and that French shaping is exactly why the spelling lost the original Latin 'i' and ended up as 'emp-'. The same imperare root still sits inside 'imperial', 'imperative', and 'empire', so it helps to remember that an emperor is the person who commands an empire. The persistent spelling trap is the unstressed ending: it is '-or', the Latin agent ending, not the more common English '-er'.

How the word is built

• emper- (from Latin imperare: to command)
• -or (agent noun: one who does)