Word.ws English Dictionary

doyens

doyens is the plural of doyen.

Meaning of 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
  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

Questions about doyens

What is doyens the plural of?
Doyens is the plural of doyen.

Words near doyens in the dictionary

  1. Doyel
  2. Doyels
  3. doyen
  4. doyenne
  5. doyennes
  6. doyens
  7. Doyle
  8. Doylean
  9. doyleite
  10. doylem
  11. doylems

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: doyens (page history and authors); doyen (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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Cite this entry: “doyens.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/doyens. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.