mandarin
Pluralmandarins
Pluralmandarins
- 1A small, sweet citrus fruit, also known as a mandarin orange.
He peeled a mandarin and shared the segments with his daughter.
Crates of mandarins fill the market stalls every winter.
Similartangerine
Note
The fruit is named after the officials of imperial China, by way of French mandarine, the feminine of mandarin. The link was probably color, the yellow of the officials' costume, though that remains a likely guess rather than a settled fact. The tree that bears the fruit and the orange shade come from the same French word.
- 2The standard variety of Chinese, an official language of China and Taiwan and one of Singapore's four official languages; also called Putonghua, Guoyu or Huayu.
The tour guide switched between Mandarin and English for the mixed group.
She took a job in Shanghai after two years of studying Mandarin at night school.
Note
The language's name points straight back to the imperial officials: Athanasius Kircher's Description of China, in John Ogilby's translation of 1669, calls it "the Mandorines Language." Unlike the official, the fruit or the bird, the language takes a capital M, and it is uncountable: you learn Mandarin, not a Mandarin.
- 3A high-ranking government official of the Chinese Empire.
The emperor sent a mandarin from the capital to look into the failed harvest.
Merchants seeking a license waited for days outside the mandarin's office.
Note
It is not a Chinese word: English took it from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri and, further back, Sanskrit mantrin, built on mantra. Today it belongs to history writing or to comparison, as when Chris Mullin's The Year of the Fire Monkey sets China's rulers beside "the mandarins of old." The fussy bureaucrat and the other figurative uses grew from this one.
- 4A branch of the Chinese languages made up of many dialects, also known as Guanhua or Beifanghua.
Linguists divide Mandarin into several regional groups, each with its own dialects.
Her grandparents spoke a rural dialect of Mandarin that their city relatives struggled to follow.
Note
This is the wider of the two Mandarins: a whole branch of dialects, with the standard national language as one variety inside it. A Mandarin class means the standard; talk of Mandarin dialects, or of how Mandarin varies from place to place, means the branch. Its other names, Guanhua and Beifanghua, belong to the branch, while Putonghua, Guoyu and Huayu name the standard.
- 5A citrus tree of the species Citrus reticulata, on which mandarins grow.
She grew a mandarin from seed, and after six years it finally bore fruit.
The mandarin by the back door blossoms in spring and is heavy with fruit by winter.
- 6A pedantic or elitist bureaucrat, fussy about minor rules or dismissive of ordinary people.
The agency's mandarins rejected the grant application because one box on page twelve was left blank.
A mandarin at the housing authority waved away the tenants' complaints as the grumbling of people who did not understand policy.
Similarbureaucrat, functionary
- 7A high-ranking member of the civil service, the permanent staff of government departments.
Treasury mandarins have warned the Chancellor that the scheme is unaffordable.
Ministers come and go, but a Whitehall mandarin can serve under several governments.
Similarofficial, bureaucrat
Note
Britain uses it as an informal nickname, not a job title: newspapers and everyday talk say mandarin where an official document would write senior civil servant. The image is borrowed from the officials of imperial China. Unlike the pedantic bureaucrat, it names a rank rather than a fault, so a mandarin in this sense need not be fussy or elitist at all.
- 8A particular shade of orange.
This season's sweaters come in navy, cream and mandarin.
The designer chose a warm mandarin for the accent wall.
Similartangerine
- 9Short for mandarin duck.
A mandarin perched on a low branch above the stream, its red bill bright against the leaves.
Birdwatchers crowded the bank after a mandarin turned up among the mallards on the canal.
Note
Among birdwatchers the second word drops away once ducks are already the subject: a pair of mandarins on a park lake needs nothing more. Elsewhere the full name is safer, since the bare word could as easily mean the fruit or the language. The bird is Aix galericulata, a perching duck with a reddish face and a large white crescent above the eye.
- 10A pedantic senior figure with influence in academia or in literary circles.
As the reigning mandarin of the English department, he decided which theories were worth teaching.
The novel was a bestseller long before the mandarins of the literary establishment took notice.
Similargrandee
Note
Whether it stings or flatters depends on the company it keeps. In 1966 Time called Waugh "the grand old mandarin of modern British prose," close to a tribute; "institutional mandarins," or judges who lean on obscure constitutional language, get the word as a jab at remote, rule-bound authority. Learned eminence is the constant, and the words beside it usually set the tone.
- 11Typical of mandarins or reminiscent of them: deliberately superior or complex, highbrow, and obscure to outsiders.
Critics admired the novel's ambition but found its mandarin prose exhausting.
She answered the reporters with a cool, mandarin detachment, as if their questions were beneath her.
Similarhighbrow, elitist, rarefied
Note
The adjective is at home in criticism, marking writing or taste as learned and a little aloof: Henry Louis Gates Jr. calls Anatole Broyard "wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times." It can also describe a manner, as when "a mandarin impassivity" settles over Smiley's face in John le Carré's Smiley's People. It is gradable: more mandarin, most mandarin.
- 12A figurine of a Chinese person with a movable, nodding head, popular in the 1950s.
At the flea market she found a porcelain mandarin with its nodding head still in working order.
The antique dealer tapped the little mandarin, and its head bobbed for nearly a minute.
Showing meanings only.
Practice
Can you tell the meanings of mandarin apart? Answer 3 quick questions from this page, or write your own sentence and AI will check it.
Origins
From Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri and its source, Sanskrit mantrin ("minister, councillor"), from mantra ("counsel, maxim, mantra") + -in, a suffix for the person who does something. A Chinese folk etymology instead traces it to Mandarin Mǎndàrén, literally "Manchu important man".
From French mandarine, the feminine of mandarin, probably from the yellow color of the mandarins' costume.
From mandarin ("an official of imperial China"), translating Chinese Guānhuà ("officials' speech"), the common language used by imperial officials. The name now covers Standard Chinese and the wider group of related dialects.