Word of the Day:
meritocracy
What It Means
A type of society where wealth, income, and social status are assigned through competition.
As a small nation without natural resources, Singapore relies on education and meritocracy to develop its economy.
Meritocracy in Context
“In Markovits’s telling, the rise of the meritocracy is a story of unintended consequences.”
Did You Know?
From merit + -o- + -cracy, coined by British sociologist Alan Fox in 1956 in an article in Socialist Commentary from May 1956, used as a derisive term, and popularized by British sociologist Michael Young, Baron Young of Dartington in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958).
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: meritocracy (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the word and reformatted its meaning, examples and origin.
Cite this entry: “meritocracy.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/meritocracy. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
