grandee
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English
Alternative forms
Etymology
Borrowed from Spanish grande (adjective), from Latin grandis (“large, great”). Doublet of grand and grande.
Pronunciation
- IPA(key): /ɡɹænˈdiː/
Audio (Southern England): (file) - Rhymes: -iː
Noun
grandee (plural grandees)
- A high-ranking nobleman in Spain or Portugal.
- 1670, Antoine de Brunel, François van Aerssen, A Journey Into Spain, page 38:
- Grandees of Spain are of two sorts, this Honour being sometimes personal, sometimes hereditary. The first, the King bids be covered themselves; the second, themselves and Heirs for ever. This is all the Ceremony in making a Grandee, neither do any other priviledges belong to it; so that it is but a Chimerical and Airy Honour, without any profit; they which marry the Heiress of a Family of a Grandee of Spain, that is such hereditarily, become Grandees in right of their Wives.
- (by extension) A person of high rank.
- Synonym: magnate
- 1880, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], chapter XXXVIII, in A Tramp Abroad; , Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Company; London: Chatto & Windus, →OCLC, page 441:
- I indicated a chair, and he sat down. This grandee was the grandson of an American of considerable note in his day, and not wholly forgotten yet,—a man who came so near being a great man that he was quite generally accounted one while he lived.
- 1897, Thomas Anstey Guthrie, “X”, in Baboo Hurry Bungsho Jabberjee, B.A., page 78:
- Whereupon most did desist; but some, secreting their cigars in the hollow of their hands, took whiffs by stealth, and blushed to find it fame; while others, who were such grandees and big pots that their own convenience was the first and foremost desideratum, continued to smoke with lordliness and indifference.
- 2021 November 27, “What Peng Shuai reveals about one-party rule”, in Economist:
- It is hard to see a good ending to the story of Peng Shuai, a Chinese tennis champion who on November 2nd accused a former Communist Party grandee more than twice her age of subjecting her to a coercive sexual relationship.
Translations
high-ranking nobleman in Spain or Portugal
person of high rank
