Word Woman

Welcome to another exciting episode of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! I thought that I would break with tradition this week and introduce a suffix rather than a word in its entirety. But please don't feel that you're not getting your verbal due, because it will be combined with various prefixes to form not one but several words in their entirety for your edification. Here we go:

-cracy

Etymology

From Ancient Greek κράτος (kratos), “‘power, rule’”).

[edit] Suffix

-cracy

1. rule

[edit] Usage notes

• Contrast -cracy with the far rarer, homophonous -crasy.

[edit] Derived terms

• See Appendix:Forms of government
• aristocracy
• autocracy
• bureaucracy
• democracy
• gynocracy
• meritocracy
• ochlocracy
• quangocracy
• sociocracy
• theocracy

-- Wiktionary, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-cracy, last modified on 17 April 2009, at 02:24.

Example: If voting were to be accomplished based purely on majority rule of all living creatures in our house, then we would definitely be living in a felinocracy. The cats would rule, if indeed it can be said that they don't already.