emperor

UK/ˈɛmp(ə)ɹə/US/ˈɛmp(ə)ɹɚ/

nounB1Very common — you will meet it every day · #2,001 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: emperors

An emperor is a man who rules an empire. The Roman emperor, the last emperor, emperor of Japan.

An emperor outranks a king, since an empire is made of more than one people or country. The only reigning emperor left in the world is the emperor of Japan, and the title survives there without any empire at all.

Definitions of emperor

1nounemperorA man who rules an empire.B1
“Napoleon crowned himself emperor of the French in 1804.”

emperor is a ruler.

Where it comes from

Latin imperator, a commander, comes from imperare, to command.

Latin
imperator
Anglo-Norman
empereor
Middle English
emperour
English, today
emperor

Built from

imperō · Latin — to command

From Middle English emperour, from Anglo-Norman empereor, from Latin imperator, derived from imperō (“to command”). a doublet of imperator. Displaced earlier casere, from Latin Caesar.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

emperor in the wild

In 800, Charlemagne was crowned emperor in Rome by Pope Leo III.
Charlemagne
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, also called Gaius or Caligula (), was the third Roman emperor, ruling from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41.
Caligula
Tiberius died in 37, and Caligula succeeded him as emperor, at the age of 24.
Caligula
Constantine I, also known as Constantine the Great, was Roman emperor from AD 306 to 337 and the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.
Constantine the Great
Pursuant to his constitutional role as a national symbol, and in accordance with rulings by the Supreme Court of Japan, the emperor is personally immune from prosecution.
Emperor of Japan

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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

empress

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