Primary
''polity'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260723122144-00-⌔
polity - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Noun
polity (countable and uncountable, plural polities)
- (politics, religion, usually uncountable) Organizational structure and governance, especially of a state or a religion.
- ✤ Coordinate term: policy
- ✤ Church polity was a topic of fierce dispute in 17th-century Britain.
- ✤ Once exposed, Confucianism was to become a political issue, an alternative among other contending ideologies which threatened to change the polity of the empire.1
- ✤ The utopian community at Ephrata flourished for forty years, and the last celibates at Ephrata died after the turn of the century. It had continuing influences reaching far into the nineteenth century, and in some measure anticipated Mormon polity and cosmology.2
- ✤ Of course, other visions of Buddhist polity and its relationship to monastic life have occurred throughout the Buddhist world. For example in the seventeenth century Tibetan Buddhists successfully established a theocracy under the guidance of monks […]3
- (political science, countable) A politically organized unit, especially a nation of people, a class or ingroup that governs it, or the state ruled thereby.
- ✤ New polities emerged in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Etymology
From Middle French politie, from Latin polītīa, from Ancient Greek πολιτεία (politeía, “polity, policy, the state”). Doublet of police, policy, and polis (“police”).
Pronunciation
Printed 2026-07-23.
(echo:: @ ⌗)
Link to original Footnotes
1979, Jerome Ch’en, China and the West: Society and Culture, 1815–1937, page 270: ↩
1994, John L. Brooke, The Refiner’s Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644–1844, →ISBN, page 42: ↩
2011, Jason A. Carbine, Sons of the Buddha: Continuities and Ruptures in a Burmese Monastic Tradition, →ISBN, page 9, note 26: ↩
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