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say it: puh-TUR-nuh-liz-uhm
paternalism is a noun meaning "the attitude (of a person or a government) that subordinates should be controlled in a fatherly way for their own good". It carries one recorded sense.
the attitude (of a person or a government) that subordinates should be controlled in a fatherly way for their own good
government
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 paternalism 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.