doyen

Noun

doyen (plural doyens)

1. (obsolete) A commander in charge of ten men.
2. The senior, or eldest male member of a group.
   • At every turn, Collyers's aggressive new management in London was out-maneuvering and out promoting the double doyens of the rarefied art auction world. Old-timers at Collyers referred to Christie's and Sotheby's as “the Cow and the Sow,” lumping them together in frequent attitudes of disdain, in...1997, Thomas Swan, The Cezanne Chase, page 171
   • Conant's sense of science's world-historic mission did not especially endear him to Harvard's doyens, most of whom still operated with a liberal arts college model of the university in which the humanities reigned supreme and even the natural sciences were treated more as teaching than research...2000, Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times, page 383
3. (colloquial) A leading light, or exemplar of a particular practice or movement.
   • Unlike the latter, however, Shifu's seriousness allowed no compromise; his criticism of Zhang ji even brought him into conflict with Wu Zhihui, one of the doyens of anarchism in China.1991, Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, page 129
   • In an interview, even Simon Baron-Cohen, another doyen of sex-difference claims, offered up some caution.2008 July 3, Amanda Schaffer, “The Sex Difference Evangelists”, part 3: “Mars, Venus, Babies, and Hormones”, in Slate