totalitarian
Americanadjective
-
of or relating to a centralized government that does not tolerate parties of differing opinion and that exercises dictatorial control over many aspects of life.
-
exercising control over the freedom, will, or thought of others; authoritarian; autocratic.
noun
adjective
noun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of totalitarian
First recorded in 1925–30; totalit(y) + -arian
Explanation
You can decipher the meaning of totalitarian by the first part: "total." It refers to a government with total power, one that exercises complete, even oppressive control over the people and their activities. (You can also figure it’s not nice.) The word totalitarian first came about in 1926 as totalitario, an adjective to describe the Italian fascism of that time. The English form was adapted from the Italian to describe an absolutely powerful regime. Socialist leader Norman Thomas once said: "To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power."
Vocabulary lists containing totalitarian
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Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I've Been to the Mountaintop" (1968)
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Power Suffix: -arian
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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.
In 1932 a Tory historian called Disraeli “the recreator of our party,” framing Conservatives as the defenders of a democratic politics as totalitarian movements loomed abroad.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 12, 2026
Freidenberg’s diaries reveal aspects of Soviet life that no one else dared to record, and shed light on the political system that, after Hannah Arendt, we have come to call totalitarian.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 24, 2026
The constitutional court said back in 2001 that "as time passes, the relative importance of standpoints and positions of people in a totalitarian state certainly has not vanished, but it has definitely decreased".
From Barron's ● Feb. 20, 2026
It was adopted two years after former Czechoslovakia had shed the totalitarian communist rule of four decades, and two years before it split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
From Barron's ● Feb. 20, 2026
He resettled in the United States in 1940, thereby avoiding any more serious consequences of challenging the totalitarian line.
From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall
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.
