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.
Examples of bureaucrat in a Sentence
Chris Roemer, Baltimore Sun, 17 July 2025
There’s a smarter way to end freeloading — without outsourcing authority over the U.S. health care system to foreign bureaucrats.
—Michelle Flowers, The Orlando Sentinel, 12 July 2025
My neighbors were professionals: engineers, doctors, artists, middle-tier bureaucrats.
—Kian Tajbakhsh, The Atlantic, 27 June 2025
Under this system, patients and physicians, not bureaucrats, would take change and prices would reflect value.
—Wayne Winegarden, Forbes.com, 23 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for bureaucrat
Cite this Entry
“Bureaucrat.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bureaucrat. Accessed 27 Jul. 2025.
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bureaucrat
noun
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