bureaucrat
noun
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 of bureaucrat
Examples of bureaucrat in a Sentence
Business Columnist, Los Angeles Times, 10 Apr. 2026
The bureaucrats of the New Deal understood that very well.
—Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic, 9 Apr. 2026
The contestants were reigning champ Jamie Ding (a bureaucrat and law student from New Jersey) and challengers Mikey Hlebasko (a sales operations director from Georgia) and Maggie Faucher (a research assistant from Pennsylvania).
—Brady MacDonald, Oc Register, 7 Apr. 2026
By comparison, a Board of Trade — in which bureaucrats, rather than markets, determine the shopping basket — looks more like industrial policy on a grand scale.
—Andy Browne, semafor.com, 7 Apr. 2026
See All Example Sentences for bureaucrat
Cite this Entry
“Bureaucrat.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bureaucrat. Accessed 19 Apr. 2026.
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bureaucrat
noun
