How to Use oligarchy in a Sentence

oligarchy

noun
  • Their nation is an oligarchy.
  • An oligarchy rules their nation.
  • The corporation is ruled by oligarchy.
  • The end state of oligarchy is chaos.
    — Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic, 19 June 2026
  • Want to imagine life if the public-health oligarchy had free rein?
    — Kimberley A. Strassel, WSJ, 15 Apr. 2021
  • Sanders has been warning about the growing threat of an oligarchy for years.
    — Emily Witt, The New Yorker, 25 Mar. 2025
  • There's an oligarchy of rich people who are close to the guy who's going to sit here.
    — NBC News, 19 Jan. 2025
  • So this is pretty much the jewel in the crown of the global oligarchies.
    — Justin Gest, Newsweek, 20 Jan. 2025
  • The wealthy were a corrupt oligarchy that needed to be shattered.
    — Matt Pearce, latimes.com, 14 June 2017
  • But that gets in the way of making America a full-on oligarchy.
    — Luke Darby, GQ, 24 Dec. 2017
  • These are to monopolies as oligarchies — rule by a few — are to monarchies.
    — Edward Lotterman, Twin Cities, 9 Mar. 2025
  • To be sure, that would be better than Trump’s malignant oligarchy.
    — John Cassidy, The New Yorker, 15 Feb. 2020
  • So much for a next generation of players ready to unseat the oligarchy.
    — Jon Wertheim, SI.com, 10 July 2019
  • We’ve been warned for decades that America is or is becoming an oligarchy.
    — Ezra Klein, The Mercury News, 31 Jan. 2025
  • The Russian term for their oligarchy is semibankirshchina—the reign of the seven bankers.
    — Simon Shuster, TIME, 21 Nov. 2024
  • The most important component of this oligarchy is the Cuban regime.
    — Moisés Naím, The Atlantic, 25 May 2017
  • Such is the suffering of the lowly expendables, but spoils of war for the oligarchy of greed and power.
    — Voice Of The People, New York Daily News, 15 Mar. 2026
  • Most countries in the region are no longer controlled by a narrow oligarchy, nor under the yanqui thumb.
    — The Economist, 12 Oct. 2017
  • The judges Kennedy has appointed in the South are designed to protect the oligarchy.
    — Fern Marja Eckman, The New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2020
  • Unlike a democracy, an oligarchy is a system where a small and elite group takes control of the government.
    — Mandy Taheri, Newsweek, 20 Dec. 2024
  • So what does the Constitution have to say about economic oligarchy?
    — Washington Post, 18 Mar. 2022
  • Is this just the messy forward march of democracy, or evidence of a malign techno-oligarchy?
    — Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker, 11 July 2019
  • But by 2018, even the English were growing uneasy about the oligarchy.
    — Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The New Republic, 24 Aug. 2022
  • Hell, the Greeks knew that social inequality was the route through which democracy turns to oligarchy.
    — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 3 May 2017
  • In others, the New World Order is not about race or religion but oligarchy.
    — Mike Giglio, The New Yorker, 28 July 2021
  • The third speaker, Darius, sees democracy and oligarchy as equally flawed.
    — Debbie Felton, The Conversation, 8 Aug. 2025
  • Before the Civil War, the court was a key ally to the slave-holding oligarchy in the South.
    — Ian MacDougall, Harper’s Magazine , 28 Sep. 2022
  • The maddening king of fantasy was deposed; the oligarchy of the writers’ room presided.
    — Namwali Serpell, New York Times, 6 June 2019
  • This post-Soviet oligarchy also occurred in Ukraine, but the war is changing that.
    — Clare Mulroy, USA TODAY, 10 Mar. 2023
  • This is the police force the Southern oligarchy has used and created to protect their interests.
    — Fern Marja Eckman, The New Yorker, 22 Sep. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'oligarchy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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