First recorded in 1890–95
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
CEO and controlling shareholder Brian Roberts has been viewed as an empire builder, but that could be changing.
From Barron's ● Dec. 12, 2025
His notion of fast-casual mirrors that of Italian empire builder Fabio Trabocchi, another discerning Washington tastemaker.
From Washington Post ● Jul. 25, 2022
While officials announced that the school would be renamed after Matobo — also called Matopo or Matopos by visitors — the president joked about the British empire builder.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 10, 2017
He was a mighty empire builder out of an Ayn Rand novel, biding his time amid the weaklings and plotting his revenge.
From New York Times ● Jul. 24, 2013
He reminds me more of E. H. Harriman than of any other American empire builder that I have met, and like Harriman he seems to be incessantly bound up to the telephone.
From An African Adventure by Marcosson, Isaac Frederick
Barely two months after the paper’s owner and publisher, the L.A. empire-builder Harrison Gray Otis, had taken over the paper, he ran this florid apologia for the meager, capricious river:
From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 1, 2022
And then there’s that dialectical puzzler, Steven Spielberg, the wunderkind turned empire-builder, who has long played the hero and the villain of modern Hollywood.
From New York Times ● Jul. 2, 2020
Zimbabwe began life as a colony of the British South African Company in the late 19th Century, run by the British empire-builder, Cecil Rhodes.
From BBC ● Nov. 15, 2017
For centuries it was a steppingstone between Europe and the Middle East, with almost every East Mediterranean empire-builder — Persians, Romans, Venetians, Ottomans — passing through a t one time or another.
From Washington Post ● Aug. 13, 2015
Fuller, Valencay, 109-10 Galt, Sir A. T., 104, 107 n.; an empire-builder, 133, 135, 329.
From The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier A Chronicle of Our Own Time by Skelton, Oscar Douglas
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
