EMPIRE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does Empire mean? 

• EMPIRE (noun)
  The noun EMPIRE has 5 senses:

1. the domain ruled by an emperor or empress; the region over which imperial dominion is exercised

2. a group of countries under a single authority

3. a monarchy with an emperor as head of state

4. a group of diverse companies under common ownership and run as a single organization

5. an eating apple that somewhat resembles a McIntosh; used as both an eating and a cooking apple

  Familiarity information: EMPIRE used as a noun is common.

 Dictionary entry details 

• EMPIRE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The domain ruled by an emperor or empress; the region over which imperial dominion is exercised

Classified under:

Nouns denoting spatial position

Synonyms:

empire; imperium

Hypernyms ("empire" is a kind of...):

demesne; domain; land (territory over which rule or control is exercised)

Instance hyponyms:

Roman Empire (an empire established by Augustus in 27 BC and divided in AD 395 into the Western Roman Empire and the eastern or Byzantine Empire; at its peak lands in Europe and Africa and Asia were ruled by ancient Rome)

Egypt; Egyptian Empire (an ancient empire to the west of Israel; centered on the Nile River and ruled by a Pharaoh; figured in many events described in the Old Testament)

Persia; Persian Empire (an empire in southern Asia created by Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC and destroyed by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC)

Russia (a former empire in eastern Europe and northern Asia created in the 14th century with Moscow as the capital; powerful in the 17th and 18th centuries under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great when Saint Petersburg was the capital; overthrown by revolution in 1917)

Ottoman Empire; Turkish Empire (a Turkish sultanate of southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa and southeastern Europe; created by the Ottoman Turks in the 13th century and lasted until the end of World War I; although initially small it expanded until it superseded the Byzantine Empire)

Derivation:

imperial (befitting or belonging to an emperor or empress)

Sense 2

Meaning:

A group of countries under a single authority

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

Context example:

the British created a great empire

Hypernyms ("empire" is a kind of...):

authorities; government; regime (the organization that is the governing authority of a political unit)

Sense 3

Meaning:

A monarchy with an emperor as head of state

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

Hypernyms ("empire" is a kind of...):

monarchy (an autocracy governed by a monarch who usually inherits the authority)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "empire"):

Mogul empire (an empire established by the Mogul conquerors of India that reigned from 1526 to 1857)

Second Empire (the imperial government of Napoleon III in France from 1852-1870)

Derivation:

imperial (relating to or associated with an empire)

Sense 4

Meaning:

A group of diverse companies under common ownership and run as a single organization

Classified under:

Nouns denoting groupings of people or objects

Synonyms:

conglomerate; empire

Hypernyms ("empire" is a kind of...):

corp; corporation (a business firm whose articles of incorporation have been approved in some state)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "empire"):

publishing conglomerate; publishing empire (a conglomerate of publishing companies)

Sense 5

Meaning:

An eating apple that somewhat resembles a McIntosh; used as both an eating and a cooking apple

Classified under:

Nouns denoting foods and drinks

Hypernyms ("Empire" is a kind of...):

dessert apple; eating apple (an apple used primarily for eating raw without cooking)

 Context examples 

Although I intend to leave the description of this empire to a particular treatise, yet, in the mean time, I am content to gratify the curious reader with some general ideas.

(Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift)

Bennu, which is only slightly wider than the height of the Empire State Building, may contain unaltered material from the very beginning of our solar system.

(NASA Mission Reveals Asteroid Has Big Surprises, NASA)

It seemed that sleep and night had resumed their empire.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Led by researchers at the University of Maryland's National-Socio Environmental Synthesis Center, the team found that the plague's effects, sometimes attributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, may have been exaggerated.

(Justinianic plague not a landmark pandemic?, National Science Foundation)

‘One of the most precious public possessions of the empire,’ said I.

(The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

This, gentlemen, is Colonel Sebastian Moran, once of Her Majesty’s Indian Army, and the best heavy-game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced.

(The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Here, in the City of London, was the taproot from which Empire and wealth and so many other fine leaves had sprouted.

(Rodney Stone, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

The rocks of the Spy-glass re-echoed it a score of times; the whole troop of marsh-birds rose again, darkening heaven, with a simultaneous whirr; and long after that death yell was still ringing in my brain, silence had re-established its empire, and only the rustle of the redescending birds and the boom of the distant surges disturbed the languor of the afternoon.

(Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson)

If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquillity of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Cæsar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed.

(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

Intense hurricanes possibly more powerful than any storms New England has experienced in recorded history frequently pounded the region during the first millennium, from the peak of the Roman Empire to the height of the Middle Ages.

(Monster hurricanes struck U.S. Northeast during prehistoric periods of ocean warming, NSF)