Word.ws English Dictionary

tyrannophobe

tyrannophobe noun: one who fears or distrusts dictatorship.

Noun

tyrannophobe (plural tyrannophobes)

  1. One who fears or distrusts dictatorship.
    • Per contra, Hobbes, who was no tyrannophobe, declared instead that political citizens were as a God to one another, while non-political men were to one another as arrant wolves (II, h).1934, John Laird, Hobbes, page 66
    • The tyrannophobe may fear dictatorship in the extreme sense we have identified—the endpoint of the continuum, where the leader faces no legal checks at all, neither elections nor the consent of others for lawmaking—or else the tyrannophobe may fear dictatorship in the weaker sense, such as abuses...2011, Eric A. Posner, Adrian Vermeule, The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic, →ISBN, page 179

Adjective

tyrannophobe (comparative more tyrannophobe, superlative most tyrannophobe)

  1. Synonym of tyrannophobic.
    • Note how the correction suppresses the tyrannophobe and immoderate expression 'tyrannical oppression' with the more neutral 'usurpation'.1996, David Hume, David Reid, David Hume of Godscroft's The History of the House of Douglas
    • The Sidney of the civic humanist school had his mind firmly set on its tyrannophobe rhetoric which defined liberty above all in terms of the absence of tyranny or a tyrannical threat and equated tyrannical rule with the rule of vice and corruption.2014, Prof Dr Dirk Wiemann, Dr Gaby Mahlberg, Perspectives on English Revolutionary Republicanism, →ISBN, page 57
    Synonyms:
    tyrannophobic

Examples of tyrannophobe in a sentence

  • On the margin of harm, the question is whether the tyrannophobe rationally considers the evidence about the costs and benefits of dictatorship.2012, Tom Ginsburg, Comparative Constitutional Design, →ISBN, page 320:
  • Most tyrants on seizing power start off by murdering the aristocracy; so conservatives are as tyrannophobe as democrats, and Dion was all that they admired.2015, Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo: A Virago Modern Classic, →ISBN:

Synonyms of tyrannophobe

Forms of tyrannophobe

Noun
pluraltyrannophobes
Adjective
comparativemore tyrannophobe
superlativemost tyrannophobe

Origin of tyrannophobe

From tyranno- + -phobe.

Questions about tyrannophobe

What does tyrannophobe mean?
Tyrannophobe means one who fears or distrusts dictatorship.
How do you use tyrannophobe in a sentence?
On the margin of harm, the question is whether the tyrannophobe rationally considers the evidence about the costs and benefits of dictatorship.
What part of speech is tyrannophobe?
Tyrannophobe can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of tyrannophobe?
The plural of tyrannophobe is tyrannophobes.

Words near tyrannophobe in the dictionary

  1. tyranno-
  2. tyrannophile
  3. tyrannophiles
  4. tyrannophilia
  5. tyrannophilic
  6. tyrannophobe
  7. tyrannophobes
  8. tyrannophobia
  9. tyrannophobic
  10. tyrannoraptoran
  11. tyrannoraptorans

Source and license

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