Tyrant

How to spell tyrant

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce tyrant

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does tyrant mean?

1. nounA ruler or person who exercises power in a cruel, oppressive, and arbitrary way.

Tyrant in a sentence

• The ancient city eventually rose up against its tyrant.

• Staff described the new manager as a workplace tyrant who controlled every detail.

Where does tyrant come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek tyrannos, which originally meant simply an absolute ruler, someone who had seized supreme power outside the usual hereditary or legal channels, with no early sense that the ruler was necessarily cruel. The Greeks applied it to strongmen who took control of city-states, and only gradually did the word gather its modern flavour of oppressive cruelty. It passed into Latin as tyrannus, and then into Old French as tirant, where a final t crept in by analogy with present-participle words ending in -ant; English borrowed that French form in the 1200s and kept the extra t, which is the spelling we still write today. The classical y survived because scholars knew the Greek root, and that y where a plain i would sound identical is the main trap in the spelling. The same tyrannos root also gives us 'tyranny' and the dinosaur name Tyrannosaurus, literally the 'tyrant lizard'.

How the word is built

• tyran(t)- (from Greek tyrannos: an absolute ruler who seizes power)
• -t (consonant added in the Old French form tirant)