On Christmas weekend, a North Korean tyrant has decided what American teenagers will see on the silver screen.
Meanwhile, someone for the opposition drafted a document for the president to read—it accused him of acting like a tyrant.
We may curse the evil Wall Street bankers, yet we allow a tyrant like Jobs to control the very rhythms of our public life.
Why should we hate him or think of him as tyrant, if he gave us jobs and paid us well?
The time is now to rid yet another West African country of a tyrant and a psychopathic leadership.
Then the king was a tyrant, and was come of the line of paynims, and took them and put them in prison in a deep hole.
But my tyrant there and I, are two buckets that can never come together.
In some eastern nations it signifies a tyrant, with the absolute power of life and death.
My tyrant turned on his heel, and hastened back to the store.
Whether it be lawful to depose an evil governor and kill a tyrant?
c.1300, "absolute ruler," from Old French tyrant (12c.), from Latin tyrannus "lord, master, tyrant" (cf. Spanish tirano, Italian tiranno), from Greek tyrannos "lord, master, sovereign, absolute ruler," a loan-word from a language of Asia Minor (probably Lydian); cf. Etruscan Turan "mistress, lady" (surname of Venus).
In the exact sense, a tyrant is an individual who arrogates to himself the royal authority without having a right to it. This is how the Greeks understood the word 'tyrant': they applied it indifferently to good and bad princes whose authority was not legitimate. [Rousseau, "The Social Contract"]The spelling with -t arose in Old French by analogy with present participle endings in -ant. Fem. form tyranness is recorded from 1590 (Spenser); cf. Medieval Latin tyrannissa (late 14c.).