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magnate

UK/ˈmæɡneɪt/US/ˈmæɡneɪt/
nounC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #12,497 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: magnates

A magnate is a rich and powerful figure in business. A shipping magnate, a press magnate.

It takes the industry before it, so there are steel magnates and property magnates. The word is faintly old-fashioned and belongs to obituaries more than to news reports.

Marcello Bacciarelli · Public domain

Definitions of magnate

  1. 1nounmagnateA rich and powerful figure in business.C2

    “The magnate owned four newspapers and a football club.”

magnate is a person.

Remember it

The Latin behind it is big. A magnate is a big man in business, big enough that the business moves when he does.

hooks ontobig

Where it comes from

Latin magnas, a great man, comes from magnus, great; English took the plural magnates first and made a singular from it.

  1. Latin

    magnātēs

  2. English, today

    magnate

Built from

  • magnus · Latin — great

Borrowed into late Middle English - from Latin magnātēs, plural of magnās, from magnus (“great”), mid 15

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

magnate in the wild

  • Ravichandran, Indian business magnate Ravichandran Ashwin, Indian cricketer Ravichandran (Kannada actor), film actor, director and producer V.

    Ravichandran

  • Sir Maximillian Michaelis, was a South African financier, mining magnate, benefactor and patron of the arts.

    Max Michaelis

  • The magnate social class arose around the 16th century and, over time, gained more and more control over Commonwealth politics.

    Magnates of Poland and Lithuania

  • The most powerful magnates were known as "little kings" due to the extent of their power and independence.

    Magnates of Poland and Lithuania

  • Magnate palaces and castles can be often found in former private magnate towns.

    Private town

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 magnus family

majormastermayor

magnate — used about once every 13,896 pages · #12,497 · point at the bar for the others