Empire

How to spell empire

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce empire

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does empire mean?

1. nounA large group of territories or peoples ruled over by a single supreme authority.
2. nounA large and powerful commercial organisation controlled by one person or company.

Empire in a sentence

• The Roman empire stretched across three continents at its height.

• She built a retail empire from a single corner shop.

• Historians debate why the ancient empire collapsed so quickly.

• The family ran a media empire spanning newspapers and television.

Where does empire come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin imperium, which meant 'command', 'authority', or 'the power to rule', built on the verb imperare, 'to command'. That verb combined the prefix in-, 'in' or 'upon', with parare, 'to prepare' or 'make ready', so the original sense was something like 'to arrange or order things from a position of authority'. Latin imperium passed into Old French as empire, and English adopted it in the early 1300s with the meaning of a large realm under a single supreme ruler. The same imperare root also gives us 'imperial', 'imperative', and the title 'emperor', which helps explain why the spelling keeps that em- opening rather than the im- you might expect from the Latin. The silent slide from imperium to empire is the main spelling reminder: it begins with em-, not im-, and ends in the French -pire.

How the word is built

• em- (from im-, 'in')
• -pire (from Latin parare, 'to prepare/command', via imperare 'to command')