regime - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
English
Noun
regime (plural regimes)
- Mode of rule or management.
- ✤ *a prison regime *
- A form of government, or the government in power, particularly an authoritarian or totalitarian one.
- ✤ *the dictator’s regime *
- ✤ Heaven will eliminate the tyrannical regimes.
- A period of rule.
- A regulated system; a regimen.
- ✤ *a fitness regime *
- ✤ For three weeks Lorde engages in a regime of rest, relaxation, eurhythmy, and active meditation.1
- ✤ It is time the international community faced the reality: we have an unmanageable, unfair, distortionary global tax regime. It is a tax system that is pivotal in creating the increasing inequality that marks most advanced countries today […].2
- ✤ Gorsuch’s theory would hobble this nondiscrimination regime by preventing the government from directing employers to tell employees about their rights and responsibilities under law.3
- A division of a Mafia crime family, led by a caporegime.
- (hydrology) A set of characteristics.
- ✤ A typical annual water level regime would include a gradual summer drawdown beginning in early May.
Etymology
From Middle English regime, regyme, from Middle French regime, from Latin regimen (“direction, government”).4 Doublet of regimen.
Pronunciation
Printed 2026-09-11.
(echo:: @ ᯤ)
Footnotes
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1988 December 11, Cheryl Clarke, “Still Shouting Down The Silence”, in Gay Community News, volume 16, number 22, page 7: ↩
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2013 June 7, Joseph Stiglitz, “Globalisation is about taxes too”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 188, number 26, page 19: ↩
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2017, Mark Joseph Stern, “The Cake Is Just the Beginning”, in Slate: ↩
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“regime, n.”, in OED Online , Oxford: Oxford University Press, launched 2000. ↩