Word.ws English Dictionary

political arithmetic

political arithmetic noun: the demographic statistics of a country or state.

Noun

political arithmetic (uncountable)

  1. (archaic, historical) The demographic statistics of a country or state.
    • I have no great faith in political arithmetic, and I mean not to warrant the exactness of either of these computations.1776, Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
    • The most basic effect of political arithmetic was namely to establish that a nation's strength depended above all on the number of inhabitants [...].2012, Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, Penguin, published 2013, page 221

Questions about political arithmetic

What does political arithmetic mean?
Political arithmetic means the demographic statistics of a country or state.
What part of speech is political arithmetic?
Political arithmetic is a noun.

Words near political arithmetic in the dictionary

  1. Politian
  2. politic
  3. political
  4. political animal
  5. political animals
  6. political arithmetic
  7. political asylum
  8. political base
  9. political bases
  10. political blackness
  11. political capital

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: political arithmetic (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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