Meaning

Nominal governance by a dead person, through posthumous holding of an official position of authority, or by popular veneration and lasting influence of a personal ideology; necrocracy..

Definitions by Sense

1. Nominal governance by a dead person, through posthumous holding of an official position of authority, or by popular veneration and lasting influence of a personal ideology; necrocracy.
2. The carrying out of mass and organized killing as an official policy of a state.
3. The enactment of policies held to lead, directly or indirectly, to death or an increased risk of death.
4. A culture in which rituals relating to the dead play a unique or important role.
5. (figuratively) Endemic stagnation or decay.

Example Sentences

Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still “eternally” held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy?

Whatever the uncertainty as to what precisely lead Germany to genocide and to the creation of a literal thanatocracy in occupied Europe, it is clear that an ethical and valuational failure of great magnitude occurred.

Kwitny's account of the medical gridlock that has paralyzed Washington during the Bush and Reagan Administrations provides a bleak picture of the indecisiveness and passivity of federal officials, whom many gay activists have described as the bureaucratic instruments of nothing less than a Republican thanatocracy.

Exodus from Egypt means a departure from the thanatocracy where all our energies are expended on building the tombs of mummified eternal death.

[…] if it neglects to maintain the physical plant which is decaying visibly and shockingly around us while refusing to upgrade the indispensable resources of teaching and learning — textbooks, encyclopedias, atlases, journals, scientific apparatus, that is, libraries and laboratories — then it is nothing more than an outright deception. As such, it remains a disingenuous exercise in crude politics, a blatant cultural scam which will do nothing but accelerate our already precipitous descent into mediocrity, incompetence, and desuetude. In short, it will become nothing more than the new thanatocracy of learning.

Word Forms

• thanatocracies

Synonyms for thanatocracy

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When Should You Use Thanatocracy?

Use thanatocracy when its meaning, tone and grammar fit the full sentence. A synonym is not always a direct replacement.

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