Skip to content
ARCHIEENGLISH
LearnPlayWordsRanking
  • Learn
  • Play
  • Words
  • Ranking
  • Mine
← Vocabulary

dominion

UK/dəˈmɪnjən/US/dəˈmɪnjən/
nounC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #7,804 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: dominions

Dominion is power to rule, or the lands ruled. Hold dominion over, the king's dominions, dominion status.

In the British Empire a Dominion was a self-governing country that still owed allegiance to the Crown — Canada, Australia and New Zealand were the first. In older religious language, dominion over the earth is the phrase from Genesis.

Definitions of dominion

  1. 1noundominionPower to rule, or the lands ruled.C1

    “The emperor had dominion over lands stretching from the sea to the mountains.”

dominion is a power.

Where it comes from

Latin dominium means lordship, from dominus, a lord, from domus, a house.

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *dem-

  2. Latin

    dominium — lordship, right of ownership

  3. Middle French

    dominion

  4. Middle English

    dominion

  5. English, today

    dominion

Built from

  • dominus · Latin — lord
  • domus · Latin — house

From Middle English dominion, from Middle French dominion, from Latin dominium (“lordship, right of ownership”), from dominus (“lord”), from domus (“house”). See demain, demesne, domain, dominium.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

dominion in the wild

  • In biological taxonomy, a domain ( or ) (Latin: regio or dominium), also dominion, is the highest taxonomic rank of all organisms taken together.

    Domain (taxonomy)

  • The 1907 royal proclamation of dominion status has never been revoked, although legal academics differ as to whether the proclamation can be said to be in force.

    Dominion of New Zealand

  • After these events, the colonies that had been assembled into the dominion reverted to their previous forms of government, although some governed informally without a charter.

    Dominion of New England

  • In 1934, Newfoundland became the only dominion to give up its self-governing status, which ended 79 years of self-government.

    Dominion of Newfoundland

  • The term Dominion was used to distinguish the federal government from the provincial ones, though after the Second World War the term federal had replaced dominion.

    Name of Canada

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.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

Related words

the domus family

domesticdominion

dominion — used about once every 2,903 pages · #7,804 · point at the bar for the others