Word.ws English Dictionary

despots

despots is the plural of despot.

Meaning of despot

Noun

despot (plural despots)

  1. A ruler with absolute power; a tyrant.
    • The Red Holocaust is best interpreted in this light as the bitter fruit of an^([sic]) utopian gambit that was socially misengineered into a dystopic nightmare by despots in humanitarian disguise.2009, Steven Rosefielde, Red Holocaust, page 240
  2. (historical) A title awarded to senior members of the imperial family in the late Byzantine Empire, and claimed by various independent or semi-autonomous rulers in the Balkans (12th to 15th centuries)

Questions about despots

What is despots the plural of?
Despots is the plural of despot.

Words near despots in the dictionary

  1. despotizing
  2. despotocracies
  3. despotocracy
  4. despotocratic
  5. despotry
  6. despots
  7. despread
  8. despreaded
  9. despreading
  10. despreads
  11. Despres

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: despots (page history and authors); despot (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Wodencafe-despots.wav.

Cite this entry: “despots.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/despots. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.