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
Frederik Riskær Pedersen, Forbes.com, 15 Aug. 2025
And then there’s the EV charging network overseen by federal bureaucrats that cost American taxpayers $7.5 billion and produced 68 stations with 384 ports.
—Las Vegas Review-Journal, Twin Cities, 10 Aug. 2025
The first is that government bureaucrats are typically terrible at running businesses.
—Editorial, Boston Herald, 7 Aug. 2025
Other countries that have experimented with manipulating their economic data, or that have incentivized bureaucrats to do so, have faced difficulties.
—Fergus McIntosh, New Yorker, 6 Aug. 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 21 Aug. 2025.
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bureaucrat
noun
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