mandarin

plural mandarins

1. historicalA high government bureaucrat of the Chinese Empire.First known use 1580s

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   LIKE THE MANDARINS of old, the rulers of China live behind high walls. When they emerge, which they rarely do, they travel in cars with rear windows curtained like sedan chairs. They live in the Chung Nan Hai, a walled park adjacent to the Forbidden City from where ancient dynasties ruled the Celestial Empire.

   1991, Chris Mullin, The Year of the Fire Monkey (Fiction), London: Chatto & Windus, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 252

2. A pedantic or elitist bureaucrat.

   The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war.

   2020 April 3, Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal”, in Financial Times, London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC

3. derogatorysometimesA pedantic senior person of influence in academia or literary circles.

   When mandarins on the court pointed to obscure language in the Constitution to overturn a century of precedent and declare the income tax unconstitutional, Harlan sided with precedent[.]

   2021 June 23, Peter S. Canellos, “Why The ‘Trump Court’ Won’t Be Like Trump”, in Politico

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   Its sting preserved to literature a fierce peculiar genius [Waugh] who, in the 40 years before his death last week at 62, achieved recognition as the grand old mandarin of modern British prose and as a satirist whose skill at sticking pens in people rates him a roomy cell in the murderers’ row (Swift, Pope, Wilde, Shaw) of English letters.

   1966 April 22, “The Beauty of His Malice”, in Time, archived from the original on 06 Nov 2012

   When institutional mandarins such as this eminent pair set out to undermine the traditional basis for remunerating the products of the mind, you might expect a lowly scribe (such as your reviewer) to take umbrage.

   2024 January 13, Boyd Tonkin, “The culture of copyright creep”, in FT Weekend (Life & Arts section), London: The Financial Times Ltd., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 9

4. abbreviationellipsisbiologyEllipsis of mandarin duck.
5. UKinformalA senior civil servant.
6. A figurine of a Chinese person with movable head that was popular in the 1950s. (Cf. bobblehead.)

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   He lay quietly in the hydropathic bed while his heart shuddered and his eyes focused at random on objects in the room, simulating a calm he could not feel. The walls of green jade, the nightlight in the porcelain mandarin whose head nodded interminably if you touched him, the multi-clock that radiated the time of three planets and six satellites, the bed itself, a crystal pool flowing with carbonated glycerine at ninety-nine point nine Fahrenheit.

   1953, Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man

comparative more mandarin · superlative most mandarin

1. Pertaining to or reminiscent of mandarins; deliberately superior or complex; esoteric, highbrow, obscurantist.First known use 20th c.

   A mandarin impassivity had descended over Smiley's face. The earlier emotion was quite gone.

   1979, John Le Carré, Smiley's People, Folio Society, published 2010, page 58

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   [Anatole] Broyard's columns were suffused with both worldliness and high culture. Wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times, he wrote like a man about town, but one who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips.

   1997, Henry Louis Gates Jr., “The Passing of Anatole Broyard”, in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, New York: Random House, pages 180–181

   Though alert to riddles' strong roots in vernacular narrative, Cook's tastes are mandarin, and she gives a loving account of Wallace Stevens's meditations on the life of poetic images and simile […].

   2007, Marina Warner, “Doubly Damned”, in London Review of Books, 29:3, p. 26

plural mandarins

1. Ellipsis of mandarin orange:
   1. A small, sweet citrus fruit.
   2. A tree of the species Citrus reticulata.
2. An orange colour.

1. Standard Mandarin, an official language of mainland China and Taiwan, and one of four official languages in Singapore; Putonghua, Guoyu or Huayu.

   Owner David Yeh says his Little-One bar -- a homophone to Lithuania's Mandarin name "Litaowan" -- started getting more attention last year after Vilnius became the first EU government to donate vaccines.

   2022 March 9, “'Lithuania mania' sweeps Taiwan as China spat sizzles”, in France 24, archived from the original on 09 Mar 2022

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   [...]and though the ſame word hath one ſignification in the Mandorines Language, and a contrary in Japan and other places, yet knowing one Speech and their Character, you may Travel not only through the Empire of China, but the adjacent Kingdoms.

   [1669, John Nievhoff, “Athanasius Kircher Description of China”, in John Ogilby, transl., An Embassy from the Eaſt-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Grand Tartar Cham Emperour of China, London: John Macock, →OCLC, page 106

   Far fewer people understood Mandarin in Hotan than anywhere else I'd been in Xinjiang. It made getting around difficult, as not only did the taxi drivers fail to understand what I was saying, but they couldn't read an address either. Most ignored or didn't know the Chinese names given to the streets anyway.

   2014, David Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, Bloomsbury USA, →ISBN, page 75

   Synonyms: Beifanghua, Guanhua, Guoyu, Huayu, Mandarin Chinese, Putonghua, Standard Chinese, Standard Mandarin

2. A branch of the Chinese languages, consisting of many dialects; Guanhua or Beifanghua.

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   "Two, three, four, five, south! Six, seven, eight, nine, north!" Strange as it may sound, this is the way the people on the Chinese mainland complain about the lack of clothes, food and other necessities. Absent from the phrases are "one" and "ten"—"i" and "shih" in Chinese Mandarin. The words for "clothes" and "food" sound alike. Also missing are "east" and "west." Their Chinese equivalents when put together as "tung-hsi," stand for "things," "objects" or "matters."

   1978 January 8, L. Chen, “What they say of Peiping rule”, in Free China Weekly, volume XIX, number 2, Taipei, page 3