police state

1. 1.

   a country that maintains repressive control over the people by means of police (especially secret police)

   Broaderdictatorship

Questions about police state

What does police state mean?

police state means "a country that maintains repressive control over the people by means of police (especially secret police)".

Is police state a common word?

police state is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.