parliamentary

Pluralparliamentaries

1. 1
   adjective

   Belonging or relating to a parliament, or enacted by a parliament.

   A parliamentary committee will question the minister about the missing funds.

   The new tax required parliamentary approval before it could take effect.

   Similarlegislative

2. 2
   adjective

   Having supreme executive and legislative power held by a cabinet of ministers who are drawn from a parliament and answerable to it.

   Under a parliamentary system, a government that loses a vote of confidence can fall.

   After independence, the country adopted a parliamentary constitution rather than a presidential one.

   Oppositepresidential

   Note

   Here the word describes a whole system of government, not one body or its business. A country can have a parliament, and plenty that is parliamentary in the plain "of a parliament" sense, without being parliamentary in this one: the test is where the cabinet comes from and to whom it answers. It usually qualifies democracy, system or government, and its usual contrast is presidential.

3. 3
   adjectivehistoricalBritish

   Describing a class of train that, under an act of parliament, ran in both directions along a line at least once a day at a fare of one penny per mile.

   The company ran a single parliamentary train each way to satisfy the law, timed for dawn when few wanted it.

   The train was moving less fast through the summer night. The swift express had changed into something almost a parliamentary, had stopped three times since Norwich, and now, at long last, was approaching Banton.

   1931, Francis Beeding, “1/1”

   Note

   A railway word from British history that came to stand for slowness: the law fixed the fare and the daily run, and the trains that met it stopped often and took their time. Francis Beeding's Death Walks in Eastrepps (1931) has a swift express that has "changed into something almost a parliamentary" after stopping three times since Norwich.

4. 4
   nounhistoricalUKcountable

   A train of the class that an act of parliament required to run both ways along a line at least daily, at a fare of a penny a mile.

   Passengers with little money waited for the morning parliamentary rather than pay the express fare.

   The timetable showed the parliamentaries calling at every halt on the branch line.

   Note

   The adjective standing on its own: a parliamentary train was shortened to a parliamentary, with the plural parliamentaries. Like the trains themselves, the noun belongs to the history of British railways, and it turns up mostly in writing about that period or set in it, where it needs no explanation for readers of the time.

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