Word.ws English Dictionary

factionary

factionary adjective: belonging to a faction; partisan; taking sides.

Adjective

factionary (not comparable)

  1. (obsolete) Belonging to a faction; partisan; taking sides.
    • Prithee, fellow, remember my name is Menenius,
      always factionary on the party of your general.c. 1608–1609 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of Coriolanus”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward]...

Noun

factionary (plural factionaries)

  1. A member of a faction.
    • Vaschus him selfe dyd greatly affecte this embasage: But neyther woolde the resydewe of his felowes electe hym therto, nor his factionaries suffer hym to departe: Aswell for that therby they thought they shulde bee left desolate, as also that they murmured that if Vaschus shulde once goo from...1555, Richard Eden (translator), The decades of the newe worlde or west India conteynyng the nauigations and conquestes of the Spanyardes by Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, London: Edwarde Sutton, Decade 2...
    • […] the traitor Ursel, some of them suppose, is dead, but if it were so, his name is sufficient to draw together his old factionaries […]1832, Walter Scott, Count Robert of Paris in Tales of My Landlord, Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 4th Series, Volume 2, Chapter 10, p. 257

Forms of factionary

pluralfactionaries

Origin of factionary

Compare French factionnaire, Latin factionarius (“the head of a company of charioteers”).

Questions about factionary

What does factionary mean?
Factionary means belonging to a faction; partisan; taking sides.
What part of speech is factionary?
Factionary can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near factionary in the dictionary

  1. factionalizers
  2. factionalizes
  3. factionalizing
  4. factionally
  5. factionaries
  6. factionary
  7. factionate
  8. factionated
  9. factionates
  10. factionating
  11. factioneer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: factionary (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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