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dictator

nounattested in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//dɪkˈteɪtə//
  • United States//ˈdɪkˌteɪtəɹ//
  • United States/[-ɾəɹ]/

An authoritarian leader of a country, nation, or government.

noun

  1. 1

    An authoritarian leader of a country, nation, or government.

    The Dominicans had lived for thirty years under the iron-fisted rule of dictator Leonidas Trujillo. During those years, which ended with Trujillo's assassination in 1961, those who opposed Trujillo had three choices: to go into exile, to go underground, or to remain quiet. Most Dominicans had chosen the third course.

    Dictator, noun : someone who doesn't let American CEOs dictate how their country is run

    "The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it was he didn't know it was there," Biden said. "That's a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn't know what happened. That wasn't supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course," Biden said.

    A monument to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin erected in Moscow's metro is stirring debate, with some Russians welcoming it as a historical tribute, but others saying it's a mistake to commemorate someone who presided over so much suffering.

  2. 2

    A magistrate without colleague in republican Ancient Rome, who held full executive authority for a term granted by the Senate, typically to conduct a war.

  3. 3

    A tyrannical boss or authority figure.

  4. 4

    Variant of dictaterMisspelling of dictater.

Etymology

From Latin dictātor (“a chief magistrate”), from dictō (“dictate, prescribe”), from dīcō (“say, speak”). By surface analysis, dictate + -or, literally “one who dictates”. Compare Old English tictator (“absolute ruler of the Roman Republic”).

Forms

plural
dictators
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).