tin-pot dictatorship
tin-pot dictatorship noun: a country ruled by a tin-pot dictator; an autocracy, especially one ruled by someone with delusions of grandeur.
Noun
tin-pot dictatorship (plural tin-pot dictatorships)
- A country ruled by a tin-pot dictator; an autocracy, especially one ruled by someone with delusions of grandeur.
- And, if so, why not the arms-dealer who sells his products to some tin-pot dictatorship, knowing that they will be used to slaughter innocent women and kids?1979, John Wainwright, Death of a Big Man, Berkley, →ISBN, page 37
- Though venality rather than thuggery is the dominant characteristic of the Gabonese political system, to an outsider the distinction is not always clear and the country can look like a classic tin-pot dictatorship—a sort of banana republic (with the part of the bananas played by Cameroonian...2007, John Hossein Ghazvinian, Untapped, Harcourt, →ISBN
Forms of tin-pot dictatorship
| plural | tin-pot dictatorships |
|---|
Origin of tin-pot dictatorship
From tin-pot dictator + -ship.
Questions about tin-pot dictatorship
- What does tin-pot dictatorship mean?
- Tin-pot dictatorship means a country ruled by a tin-pot dictator; an autocracy, especially one ruled by someone with delusions of grandeur.
- What part of speech is tin-pot dictatorship?
- Tin-pot dictatorship is a noun.
- What is the plural of tin-pot dictatorship?
- The plural of tin-pot dictatorship is tin-pot dictatorships.
Words near tin-pot dictatorship in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: tin-pot dictatorship (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: “tin-pot dictatorship.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tin-pot_dictatorship. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.