# colonel

Pronunciation: say "KUR-nuhl" US /ˈkɝ.nl̩/, UK /ˈkɜː.nl̩/

## Noun

1. A senior military officer, ranking above lieutenant colonel and below brigadier or brigadier general, traditionally the commander of a regiment.
   - Simple: A high-ranking officer in the army, air force, or marines, who often leads a regiment.
   - _The colonel commanding the regiment was promoted to brigadier general last spring._
   - _Two colonels from the Marine Corps briefed the committee on the new training program._
2. An honorary title that some southern US states, most commonly Kentucky, give to civilians, Colonel Sanders of KFC among them.
   - Simple: A title given as an honor by some southern US states, most often Kentucky, to people who are not soldiers.
   - _The governor named the retired teacher a Kentucky colonel for her decades of community service._
   - _He never served a day in uniform, but after the governor's commission arrived, everyone in town called him Colonel._

## Noun

3. An informal title of address for an elderly man. *(dated, Southern US)*
   - Simple: A casual way of addressing an old man.
   - _The storekeeper greeted every gray-haired customer as Colonel, whether or not the man had ever worn a uniform._
   - _Out of old Southern habit, she called any elderly man on her porch Colonel, soldier or not._

## Other meanings

- (noun) A form of address for an auctioneer, a usage that goes back to the American Civil War, when commanding officers organized public sales of seized goods.
- (verb) To serve as a colonel, or to behave like one.

## Origin

The word is first recorded in the 1540s. It came from Middle French coronnel, which took it from Old Italian colonnello, the officer leading a small column of soldiers at the front of a regiment. That title came from compagnia colonnella ("little column company") and in the end from Latin columna ("pillar"), a relative of culmen ("top, summit"), going back to a Proto-Indo-European root *kelH- ("to rise, be prominent"). In the 1580s, learned writers respelled it to match the Italian, while pronunciations with "r" and with "l" coexisted until about 1650, after which only the "r" form survived.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/colonel (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).