Word.ws English Dictionary

pedantocracy

pedantocracy noun: government by pedants.

Noun

pedantocracy (countable and uncountable, plural pedantocracies)

  1. Government by pedants.
    • […] if we would not have our bureaucracy degenerate into a pedantocracy, this body must not engross all the occupations which form and cultivate the faculties required for the government of mankind.1859, John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, page 148
    • Bureaucracy too, in education as elsewhere (perhaps especially in education) was prone to pedantocracy and to slow strangulation in the toils of its own immutable maxims.1980, F[rancis] W[illiam] Garforth, “Conclusion”, in Educative Democracy: John Stuart Mill on Education in Society (University of Hull Publications), Oxford, Oxfordshire; New York, N.Y.: […] [F]or...

Forms of pedantocracy

pluralpedantocracies

Origin of pedantocracy

From pedant + -ocracy.

Questions about pedantocracy

What does pedantocracy mean?
Pedantocracy means government by pedants.
What part of speech is pedantocracy?
Pedantocracy is a noun.
What is the plural of pedantocracy?
The plural of pedantocracy is pedantocracies.

Words near pedantocracy in the dictionary

  1. pedantized
  2. pedantizes
  3. pedantizing
  4. pedantly
  5. pedantocracies
  6. pedantocracy
  7. pedantocrat
  8. pedantocratic
  9. pedantocrats
  10. pedantries
  11. pedantry

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pedantocracy (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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