subaltern

1. 1.

   a British commissioned army officer below the rank of captain

   Broadercommissioned military officer

   military

1. 1.

   inferior in rank or status

   “the junior faculty”

   “a lowly corporal”

   “petty officialdom”

   “a subordinate functionary”

   Synonymsjunior-gradelower-rankinglowlypettysecondary

   Similarjunior

Other forms of subaltern

plural

subalterns·

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.

Questions about subaltern

What does subaltern mean?

subaltern means "a British commissioned army officer below the rank of captain". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in subaltern?

subaltern has 3 syllables: su-bal-tern. The stress falls on "su".

What is another word for subaltern?

Close synonyms include junior-grade, lower-ranking, lowly, petty, secondary. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is subaltern a common word?

subaltern 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.