Word.ws English Dictionary

proprietarian

UK/pɹəˌpɹaɪ.əˈtɛəɹi.ən/US/pɹəˌpɹaɪ.əˈtɛɹi.ən/

proprietarian noun: a proponent of proprietarianism, that is, of proprietary colonies and proprietary government in colonial America.

Noun (1)

proprietarian (plural proprietarians)

  1. (historical) A proponent of proprietarianism, that is, of proprietary colonies and proprietary government in colonial America.
    • The quakers and proprietarians together have little weight. New Jersey shows a noble ardor. Is there any thing in the air or soil of New York unfriendly to the spirit of liberty?1854, John Adams, Charles Francis Adams, Works: with a life of the author, page 411
    • When Richard Peters reported to Penn on 2 October that the proprietarians had lost the election, he did not mention Franklin's supposed betrayal of Allen, Hamilton, and Chew.2008, J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, Volume 3: Soldier, Scientist, and Politician, 1748-1757, University of Pennsylvania Press, →ISBN, page 536
  2. (China) A person who owns property (a proprietor) or believes in proprietarianism, that is, that property is an absolute right.
    • The poor have been classified as the proletarians and the rich as the proprietarians on the Chinese mainland. In the Communist view all proletarians are good men and all proprietarians are bad men.1974, Free China Review
    • This is because in the capitalist nations, most people are wealthy and are proprietarians; therefore, their social culture and social logic are established on the basis of the wealthy.2017, Xu Xue Chun, Century Sentence: A Diary Written to God Accusing Against All of the World, →ISBN

Noun (2)

proprietarian (plural proprietarians)

  1. (rare) A stickler for proprieties.
    • The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at a soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the demimonde where they say any thing.1883, William Dean Howells, Venetian Life, Leipzig: B. Tauschnitz, page 331
    • We could do just about as we very well pleased, so long as we did not hurt ourselves or others, and so long as we understood right from wrong. Indeed, we were disciplined by proprietarians.1977, Eva Malott, Ada McPhilliamy, Dick Pence, Digging our roots, page 158

Forms of proprietarian

pluralproprietarians

Origin of proprietarian

From proprietary + -an (or + -ian).

From propriety + -arian.

Words that rhyme with proprietarian

48 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about proprietarian

What does proprietarian mean?
Proprietarian means a proponent of proprietarianism, that is, of proprietary colonies and proprietary government in colonial America.
What part of speech is proprietarian?
Proprietarian is a noun.
How do you pronounce proprietarian?
Proprietarian is pronounced /pɹəˌpɹaɪ.əˈtɛəɹi.ən/ (UK).
What is the plural of proprietarian?
The plural of proprietarian is proprietarians.

Words near proprietarian in the dictionary

  1. proprializations
  2. propridium
  3. proprietage
  4. proprietarial
  5. proprietarially
  6. proprietarian
  7. proprietarianism
  8. proprietarians
  9. proprietariat
  10. proprietaries
  11. proprietarily

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: proprietarian (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: “proprietarian.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/proprietarian. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.