Other forms: autonomies
Autonomy is being the one who decides. A teenager choosing her own subjects, a nurse who can change a dose without ringing anybody, an island that runs its own schools and courts — all of them have autonomy.
The word is abstract, so it lives in serious writing: patient autonomy in a hospital, regional autonomy in politics, professional autonomy at work. It nearly always takes a possessive or OF — her autonomy, the autonomy of the university. The adjective is autonomous, and it has picked up a machine sense as well: an autonomous vehicle drives with nobody steering. Autonomy is not the same as being alone or doing whatever you like; it is having the authority to decide, and it can sit quite happily inside a set of rules. What people set against it is control — somebody else's.
1nounautonomyThe freedom to make your own decisions about your own life or work.~19%
“Older students are given more autonomy over what they study.”
synonyms: independence, self-determination
2nounselfThe right of a region, people or institution to govern itself inside a larger state.~76%
“The islands were granted autonomy in everything except defence.”
synonyms: self-rule, home rule
3nounabilityThe ability of a machine to work without a person controlling it.~5%
“The drone has enough autonomy to finish the survey on its own.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 21 sentences found in the wild and placed 21 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
autonomy is a kind of freedom.
Ancient Greek αὐτονομῐ́ᾱ meant freedom to use its own laws, independence: self plus law, built on the adjective αὐτόνομος. The Greek word never meant lawlessness. It meant living under laws of your own making rather than someone else's, and that is still the heart of autonomy — not the absence of rules, but the right to set them.
Ancient Greek
αὐτονομῐ́ᾱ
English, today
autonomy
Borrowed from Ancient Greek αὐτονομῐ́ᾱ. Ancient Greek αὐτονομῐ́ᾱ (“freedom to use its own laws, independence”), from αὐτόνομος + -ῐ́ᾱ. by surface analysis, auto- + -nomy.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA