chiefdom

noun

chief·​dom ˈchēf-dəm 

1

: the position or office of a chief : leadership

Mandla Mandela's rise was a great source of pride for Mr. Mandela, who wrote of the pain of his father losing his chiefdom after a dispute with colonial authorities.

—Lydia Polgreen

Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel), who started off as a bumbling weakling in need of draconic pedagogy, has now ascended to the chiefdom of the wacky Viking village of Berk.

—Chris McCoy

2

: a region or a people ruled by a chief

The Timucua lived along the northern Atlantic coast of the Florida peninsula …. Although they were somewhat unified linguistically, speaking a dozen or so dialects of one language family, they were politically divided into as many as fifty distinct chiefdoms.

—Christopher M. Stojanowski

However, some tribes and even chiefdoms consist of herders who move seasonally.

—Jared Diamond

Examples of chiefdom in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

For now, at least, the Muisca chiefdom of Guatavita, once a prestigious ceremonial pilgrimage site known for the skill of its goldsmiths, is the most likely origin of the myth. —Shoshi Parks, Smithsonian Magazine, 4 Sep. 2024

The original inhabitants, whose descendants now make up a small minority in Taiwan, were Austronesian tribes who ruled themselves in a number of chiefdoms. —Ian Buruma, The New Yorker, 24 June 2024

Graeber and Wengrow conclude that the simplistic models of social evolution that draw a straight line from forager bands to tribes and chiefdoms to ever-larger states are too crude to be of much value. —Walter Scheidel, Foreign Affairs, 19 Apr. 2022

First came the Spanish, who encountered a dense web of chiefdoms and a century of resistance. —Scott W. Stern, The New Republic, 26 June 2023

During the 12th to 16th centuries coastal chiefdoms in the Philippines sent slave-raider fleets across the region, attacking smaller groups. —Catherine M. Cameron, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2017

Consider the 16th-century chiefdoms in the Cauca Valley of Colombia, which were constantly at war. —Catherine M. Cameron, Scientific American, 1 Dec. 2017

Under the Piscataway chiefdom, other tribes — including the Yaocomico, Mattawoman, Pamunkey, Mattaponi and Nanjemoy — were interconnected with their own systems of justice, governing and defending themselves. —Dana Hedgpeth, Washington Post, 7 Nov. 2022

At the time, the Yaocomaco people—an Indigenous tribe loosely affiliated with the Piscataway chiefdom—lived in the region. —Isis Davis-Marks, Smithsonian Magazine, 24 Mar. 2021

Word History

First Known Use

1566, in the meaning defined at sense 1