Skip to content
OneKitly

anarchy

nounattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈæn.ɚ.ki//
  • Australia//ˈæn.ə.ki//
  • //ˈeə̯n.ɚ.ki//

The state of a society being without authorities or an authoritative governing body.

noun

  1. 1

    The state of a society being without authorities or an authoritative governing body.

    Oui, l’anarchie c’est l'ordre; car, le gouvernement c’est la guerre civile.

    Rather than democracy, justice as well as economic efficiency require a pure and unrestricted private property society – an ‘anarchy of production’ – in which no one rules anybody, and all producers’ relations are voluntary, and thus mutually beneficial.

  2. 2

    rareThe political theory that a community is best organized by the voluntary cooperation of individuals, rather than by a government, which is regarded as being coercive by nature.

  3. 3

    A chaotic and confusing absence of any form of political authority or government.

    And each dweller, panic-stricken, Felt his heart with terror sicken Hearing the tempestuous cry Of the triumph of Anarchy.

  4. 4

    Confusion in general; disorder.

    It was total anarchy in the clothes shop on Black Friday as soon as they opened the doors.

    Der Widerspruch zwischen gesellschaftlicher Produktion und kapitalistischer Aneignung stellt sich nun dar als Gegensatz zwischen der Organisation der Produktion in der einzelnen Fabrik und der Anarchie der Produktion in der ganzen Gesellschaft.

    The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *né Proto-Indo-European *n̥- Proto-Hellenic *ə- Ancient Greek ἀ- (a-) Proto-Indo-European *h₂er-der.? Proto-Indo-European *h₂ergʰ-der.? Ancient Greek ἄρχω (árkhō) Proto-Indo-European *-h₂ Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂ Proto-Hellenic *-ā́ Ancient Greek -ᾱ (-ā) Ancient Greek -η (-ē) Ancient Greek ἀρχή (arkhḗ) Ancient Greek -ος (-os) Ancient Greek ἄναρχος (ánarkhos) Proto-Indo-European *-h₂ Proto-Indo-European *-éh₂ Proto-Indo-European *-i-eh₂ Proto-Hellenic *-íā Ancient Greek -ῐ́ᾱ (-ĭ́ā) Ancient Greek ᾰ̓νᾰρχῐ́ᾱ (ănărkhĭ́ā)der. New Latin anarchiader. English anarchy From New Latin anarchia, from Ancient Greek ἀναρχία (anarkhía). By surface analysis, an- + -archy.

Forms

plural
anarchies
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).