grandee

Noun

grandee (plural grandees)

1. A high-ranking nobleman in Spain or Portugal.
   • Grandees of Spain are of two sorts, this Honour being sometimes personal, sometimes hereditary. The first, the King bids be covered themselves; the second, themselves and Heirs for ever. This is all the Ceremony in making a Grandee, neither do any other priviledges belong to it; so that it is but a...1670, Antoine de Brunel, François van Aerssen, A Journey Into Spain, page 38
   • This Duke Ricardo, Señores, as you probably know, is a grandee from Spain whose lands are the best in Andalucía.Part 1 published in 1605, Part 2 in 1615, translated in 2003, Miguel de Cervantes and translated by Edith Grossman, Don Quixote, page 185
2. (broadly) A person of high rank.
   • I indicated a chair, and he sat down. This grandee was the grandson of an American of considerable note in his day, and not wholly forgotten yet,—a man who came so near being a great man that he was quite generally accounted one while he lived.1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym] (Samuel L[anghorne] Clemens), chapter XXXVIII, in A Tramp Abroad; […], Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, page 441
   • Whereupon most did desist; but some, secreting their cigars in the hollow of their hands, took whiffs by stealth, and blushed to find it fame; while others, who were such grandees and big pots that their own convenience was the first and foremost desideratum, continued to smoke with lordliness and...1897, Thomas Anstey Guthrie, “X”, in Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A., page 78

   Synonyms:

   magnate