mandarin

noun

1. 1

   historicalA high government bureaucrat of the Chinese Empire.

   LIKE THE MANDARINS of old, the rulers of China live behind high walls. When they emerge, which they rarely do, they travel in cars with rear windows curtained like sedan chairs. They live in the Chung Nan Hai, a walled park adjacent to the Forbidden City from where ancient dynasties ruled the Celestial Empire.

2. 2

   A pedantic or elitist bureaucrat.

   The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war.

3. 3

   A pedantic senior person of influence in academia or literary circles.

   Its sting preserved to literature a fierce peculiar genius [Waugh] who, in the 40 years before his death last week at 62, achieved recognition as the grand old mandarin of modern British prose and as a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers’ row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters.

   When mandarins on the court pointed to obscure language in the Constitution to overturn a century of precedent and declare the income tax unconstitutional, Harlan sided with precedent[.]

   When institutional mandarins such as this eminent pair set out to undermine the traditional basis for remunerating the products of the mind, you might expect a lowly scribe (such as your reviewer) to take umbrage.

4. 4

   informalA senior civil servant.

5. 5

   A figurine of a Chinese person with movable head that was popular in the 1950s. (Cf. bobblehead.)

6. 6

   Variant of mandarin duckEllipsis of mandarin duck.

adjective

1. 1

   Pertaining to or reminiscent of mandarins; deliberately superior or complex; esoteric, highbrow, obscurantist.

   A mandarin impassivity had descended over Smiley's face. The earlier emotion was quite gone.

   [Anatole] Broyard's columns were suffused with both worldliness and high culture. Wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times, he wrote like a man about town, but one who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips.

   Though alert to riddles' strong roots in vernacular narrative, Cook's tastes are mandarin, and she gives a loving account of Wallace Stevens's meditations on the life of poetic images and simile […].

noun

1. 1

   Ellipsis of mandarin orange: A small, sweet citrus fruit.

2. 2

   Ellipsis of mandarin orange: A tree of the species Citrus reticulata.

3. 3

   An orange colour.

Forms

plural

mandarins

comparative

more mandarin

superlative

most mandarin