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
Vikram Murthi, IndieWire, 5 Dec. 2025
This schedule isn’t written in stone; it’s written in pencil by bureaucrats in Zurich who really, really enjoy revenue.
—Dieter Kurtenbach, Mercury News, 5 Dec. 2025
There’s no knowledge required to be a diversity bureaucrat.
—John Stossel, Oc Register, 3 Dec. 2025
Goethe, in his first decade at Weimar, lived half as a child of nature, half as a bureaucrat.
—Merve Emre, New Yorker, 1 Dec. 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 8 Dec. 2025.
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bureaucrat
noun
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