Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun One who holds an office or a trust or performs a particular function; an official.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun One who holds an office or a trust: as, a public functionary; secular functionaries.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun One charged with the performance of a function or office
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A person employed as an
official in abureaucracy (usuallycorporate orgovernmental ) who holds limited authority and primarily serves to carry out a simplefunction for whichdiscretion is not required.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a worker who holds or is invested with an office
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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A government functionary is going to make rules about what you can get and what you can't!
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"No. We want a-- er -- what the deuce is it they call the functionary, Cassius?"
A House-Boat on the Styx John Kendrick Bangs 1892
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He had the characteristic of a good functionary, that is to say, he had no mind of his own, and simply did what he was told or what he conceived to be his duty as a member of the administrative system.
Russia 1917
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Most of what the public sees the practitioner doing could be described as functionary activity.
RISMedia 2009
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Finally, we referred to the transformation of the teacher's identity from that of a state "functionary" - "a word that is rarely used today, while a few years before it indicated a prestigious identity and an obsolete social-democratic,
Anarkismo.net 2008
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That said, I think I am right when I talk about the 'functionary'.
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According to GOP party "functionary" Hugh Hewitt, the conservative white men are chickening out because YouTube and CNN have that famous liberal bias.
Archive 2007-07-01 2007
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We must spell out what kind of functionary can be removed at any particular moment of the day or night.
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There's a lot of crap you can say about Blanche -- and we do -- but a "functionary" of Nancy Pelosi?
DownWithTyranny! 2009
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The fish are being proffered—oops, offered—by a cold-hearted functionary of the New York Zoo, while the love emanates from, yes, you guessed it.
'Buck': Champion Tale of a Horse Guru Joe Morgenstern 2011
dailyword commented on the word functionary
Moustafa called himself this in the second Austin Powers movie.
June 12, 2012