bureaucrat

noun

bu·​reau·​crat ˈbyu̇r-ə-ˌkrat 

ˈbyər-

: a member of a bureaucracy

government bureaucrats

Did you know?

In French, a bureau is a desk, so bureaucracy means basically "government by people at desks". Despite the bad-mouthing they often get, partly because they usually have to stick so close to the rules, bureaucrats do almost all the day-to-day work that keeps a government running. The idea of a bureaucracy is to split up the complicated task of governing a large country into smaller jobs that can be handled by specialists. Bureaucratic government is nothing new; the Roman empire had an enormous and complex bureaucracy, with the bureaucrats at lower levels reporting to bureaucrats above them, and so on up to the emperor himself.

Synonyms

• civil servant
• functionary
• mandarin
• public servant

Examples of bureaucrat in a Sentence

the bureaucrats at the town hall seem to think that we need a building permit to build a tree house

Recent Examples on the Web

But in Washington, the techno-libertarian pivot demands that regulators’ overreach be confined to the echo chambers of an ever-dwindling group of bureaucrats—and their rules remain unwritten. Follow me on Twitter. —Clyde Wayne Crews Jr., Forbes, 12 Jan. 2025

Vivek Ramaswamy [Archival audio]: Elon Musk and I are in a position to start the mass deportations of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bureaucracy. —Lauren Goode, WIRED, 9 Jan. 2025

Trump has pledged to fire bureaucrats who would impede his agenda during his second term. —Michael Collins, USA TODAY, 27 Nov. 2024

The film opens with a short, satirical cartoon about Soviet bureaucrats forcefully replacing idiosyncratic historic buildings with nearly identical, unadorned apartment blocks. —Valeriya Safronova, New York Times, 31 Dec. 2024

Word History

Etymology

borrowed from French bureaucrate, after bureaucratie — more at bureaucracy, -crat

First Known Use

1832, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

bureaucrat

noun

bu·​reau·​crat ˈbyu̇r-ə-ˌkrat 

: a member of a bureaucracy