New Republic
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The resemblance between arrogate and arrogant is more than coincidence: they both have the Latin verb arrogare, meaning “to appropriate to one's self,” at their root. This idea of claiming or seizing something as one’s right is immediately apparent in the English word arrogate: the word is used primarily to talk about taking or claiming a right or a privilege in a way that is not fair or legal. In arrogant the idea of appropriation is slightly veiled: by showing an offensive attitude of superiority, an arrogant person claims—that is, arrogates—more consideration than they are due.
Examples of arrogate in a Sentence
John Tamny,
Forbes.com,
22 May 2026
But all of those ideas for spending or tax rebates, again, all of those are congressional authority that the president is arrogating to himself—something else that would have startled the founders of the country all those 250 years ago.
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David Frum,
The Atlantic,
31 Dec. 2025
Like Mao and Deng before him, Xi Jinping has arrogated to himself great power.
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Joseph Torigian,
Foreign Affairs,
23 June 2025
Trump arrogated to himself the authority to impose sweeping tariffs on the entire world, a power that properly belongs to Congress, and has caused turmoil throughout the economy; many economic indicators are now pointing in the wrong direction.
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The Editors,
National Review,
29 Apr. 2025
Back before the federal government arrogated to itself an outsize role as financier of college education, the Wayne States of the world were where ambitious people who didn’t have a lot of money, who wanted to save money on college, or both, got their degrees.
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John Tamny,
Forbes,
12 Oct. 2024
In every period, the essence of politics has been that a tin-pot tsar who wants to arrogate to himself the right to personal, unaccountable power needs to intimidate the honest people who are not afraid of him.
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Alexei Navalny,
The New Yorker,
11 Oct. 2024
Cite this Entry
“Arrogate.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arrogate. Accessed 29 Jun. 2026.
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arrogate
verb
