bureaucrat

UK/ˈbjʊəɹəkɹæt/US/ˈbjʊɹəkɹæt/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #10,140 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: bureaucrats

A bureaucrat is an official who follows the rules rigidly in an administration. The person who cannot help because the form says otherwise.

The word is almost always an insult, which is its whole point, since civil servant is the neutral term for the same job. Calling somebody a bureaucrat says they care more about procedure than about the outcome. The noun bureaucracy means both the system and the excess of it, and red tape is the everyday phrase. Sociology uses bureaucracy as a technical and quite neutral term for rule-based organisation.

Definitions of bureaucrat

1nounbureaucratAn official who applies rules rigidly rather than sensibly.B2+
“Some bureaucrat had decided the form was invalid.”

Where it comes from

French
bureaucrate
English, today
bureaucrat

Borrowed from French bureaucrate. From French bureaucrate, equivalent to bureau + -crat.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 35 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

bureaucrat in the wild

A mandarin was a scholar-bureaucrat in the historical governments of China, Korea, and Vietnam.
Mandarin (bureaucrat)
The scholar-officials, also known as literati, scholar-gentlemen or scholar-bureaucrats, were government officials and prestigious scholars in Chinese society, forming a distinct social class.
Scholar-official
Street-level bureaucrats often have some degree of discretion on how they enforce the rules, laws and policies which they are assigned to uphold.
Street-level bureaucracy
Even though front-line bureaucrats have this degree of discretion, they typically must operate within the rule of law, the system of government regulations, laws and administrative procedural rules.
Street-level bureaucracy
Outside politics he worked as a primary school teacher and bureaucrat.
Åge Konradsen

1 / 2

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the bureaucrate family

bureaucratic bureaucrat

bureaucrat — used about once every 5,793 pages · #10,140 · point at the bar for the others

← Vocabulary