Other forms: bureaucracies
Bureaucracy is the machinery of offices, forms and rules that a large organisation runs on — and the delay that comes with it. Three signatures to change an address, a form you can only hand in on Tuesdays, a counter that closes for lunch just as you reach it.
The word runs in two directions. Coolly, it names the body of officials who actually operate a government or a company, the people who stay while ministers come and go. Angrily, it names procedure for its own sake, and that is the sense you hear at a service desk: 'I have been fighting the bureaucracy for six weeks.' The person is a bureaucrat, the adjective is bureaucratic, and the plain English for the frustrating part is red tape. Politicians promise to cut through it; the layers grow back.
1nounbureaucracyThe rules, forms and procedures of an organisation, especially when they make simple things slow.
“Getting the building permit took nine months of bureaucracy.”
synonyms: red tape
2nouncountryA system in which a country or organisation is run by appointed officials.
“The empire was held together by an enormous bureaucracy.”
3nountakenThe officials of such a system, taken together as a body.
“The bureaucracy quietly resisted every reform the new minister announced.”
bureaucracy is a system of administration.
Also accepted in games: red tape
The word was coined in French by the economist Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay, who fixed bureau, 'office', onto -cratie, 'rule of'. The pattern is the one behind democracy and aristocracy — rule by the people, rule by the best, and now rule by the office. English took the whole thing over as bureaucracy.
French
bureaucratie
English, today
bureaucracy
Built from
From French bureaucratie. From bureau + -cracy, from French bureaucratie, coined by Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay from bureau (“office”) + -cratie (“rule of”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA