mandarin — English Dictionary

Noun

1. A high government bureaucrat of the Chinese Empire.

   Usage

   • Historical

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   LIKE THE MANDARINS of old, the rulers of China live behind high walls. When they emerge, which they rarely do, they travel in cars with rear windows curtained like sedan chairs. They live in the Chung Nan Hai, a walled park adjacent to the Forbidden City from where ancient dynasties ruled the Celestial Empire.

2. A pedantic or elitist bureaucrat.

   Examples

   The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war.

3. A pedantic senior person of influence in academia or literary circles.

   Usage

   • Derogatory
   • sometimes

   Examples

   More examples (3)

   Its sting preserved to literature a fierce peculiar genius [Waugh] who, in the 40 years before his death last week at 62, achieved recognition as the grand old mandarin of modern British prose and as a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers’ row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters.

   When mandarins on the court pointed to obscure language in the Constitution to overturn a century of precedent and declare the income tax unconstitutional, Harlan sided with precedent[.]

   When institutional mandarins such as this eminent pair set out to undermine the traditional basis for remunerating the products of the mind, you might expect a lowly scribe (such as your reviewer) to take umbrage.

4. A senior civil servant.

   Usage

   • UK usage
   • Informal

5. A figurine of a Chinese person with movable head that was popular in the 1950s. (Cf. bobblehead.)

   Examples

   More examples (1)

   He lay quietly in the hydropathic bed while his heart shuddered and his eyes focused at random on objects in the room, simulating a calm he could not feel. The walls of green jade, the nightlight in the porcelain mandarin whose head nodded interminably if you touched him, the multi-clock that radiated the time of three planets and six satellites, the bed itself, a crystal pool flowing with carbonated glycerine at ninety-nine point nine Fahrenheit.

Adjective

1. Pertaining to or reminiscent of mandarins; deliberately superior or complex; esoteric, highbrow, obscurantist.

   Examples

   A mandarin impassivity had descended over Smiley's face. The earlier emotion was quite gone.

   More examples (2)

   [Anatole] Broyard's columns were suffused with both worldliness and high culture. Wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times, he wrote like a man about town, but one who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips.

   Though alert to riddles' strong roots in vernacular narrative, Cook's tastes are mandarin, and she gives a loving account of Wallace Stevens's meditations on the life of poetic images and simile […].

Noun

1. Ellipsis of mandarin orange: A small, sweet citrus fruit.

2. Ellipsis of mandarin orange: A tree of the species Citrus reticulata.

3. An orange colour.

Noun

1. shrub or small tree having flattened globose fruit with very sweet aromatic pulp and thin yellow-orange to flame-orange rind that is loose and easily removed; native to southeastern Asia

   Synonyms

   mandarin orangemandarin orange treeCitrus reticulata

   Broader terms

   citruscitrus tree

2. a member of an elite intellectual or cultural group

   Broader terms

   elitist

3. any high government official or bureaucrat

   Broader terms

   officialfunctionary

4. a high public official of imperial China

   Broader terms

   Chinese

5. a somewhat flat reddish-orange loose skinned citrus of China

   Synonyms

   mandarin orange

   Broader terms

   citruscitrus fruitcitrous fruit