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say it: AH-luh-gahr-kee
oligarchy is a noun meaning "a political system governed by a few people". It carries one recorded sense.
a political system governed by a few people
“one of his cardinal convictions was that Britain was not run as a democracy but as an oligarchy”
“the big cities were notoriously in the hands of the oligarchy of local businessmen”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for oligarchy come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.