noun
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the state or quality of being incumbent
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the office, duty, or tenure of an incumbent
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of incumbency
First recorded in 1600–10; incumb(ent) + -ency
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
But she also noted that Mastercard and Visa have “two-sided networks across billions of consumers and hundreds of millions of merchants” that confer major incumbency advantages.
From MarketWatch ● Feb. 28, 2026
“You’ve got a huge incumbency advantage having the megawatts today,” says Energy Capital Partners’ Kimmelman.
From Barron's ● Oct. 17, 2025
Mr. Miyares, whose mother fled Cuba, has the advantage of incumbency.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 13, 2025
Labor's Anthony Albanese has defied the so-called "incumbency curse" to be re-elected Australia's prime minister in a landslide.
From BBC ● May 3, 2025
During his incumbency he undertook the great work of re-building his parish church in the Early Decorated style upon the old ground plan.
From Norfolk Annals A Chronological Record of Remarkable Events in the Nineteeth Century, Vol. 2 by Charles Mackie
Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel lost their primaries to energetic challengers because they were arrogant and too comfortable in their incumbencies.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 14, 2022
You can’t run for alderman and mayor at the same time, so the mayoral slate didn’t include any of the city’s elected officials, who would have had to rashly sacrifice their incumbencies.
From Slate ● Sep. 6, 2018
With long incumbencies, said Professor Zimring of the University of California, Berkeley, “innovation is very difficult, and new blood may need new veins and organizational arteries.”
From New York Times ● Feb. 4, 2012
One thinks of time in terms of production schedules and amortizations, the other in terms of incumbencies and election days.
From Time Magazine Archive
The Assembly agreed to and proposed good and appropriate reforms, amongst which was that relating to the incumbencies which were monopolized by the friars.
From The Philippine Islands by John Foreman
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.
