What is another word for usurp?

Pronunciation: [juːzˈɜːp] (IPA)

Usurp is a word used to describe the act of seizing power, rights, or possessions unlawfully. There are a variety of synonyms that can be used to describe this action, including "seize," "take over," "usurpation," "appropriate," "commandeer," "annex," "confiscate," "occupy," and "hijack." Each of these words denotes the idea of taking something that does not rightfully belong to the individual in question. Regardless of the specific synonym used, usurping is an action that is generally frowned upon and is seen as a violation of authority and/or property rights.

Synonyms for Usurp:

What are the paraphrases for Usurp?

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What are the hypernyms for Usurp?

A hypernym is a word with a broad meaning that encompasses more specific words called hyponyms.

What are the hyponyms for Usurp?

Hyponyms are more specific words categorized under a broader term, known as a hypernym.

What are the opposite words for usurp?

Usurp means to take over or seize something without right or authority. The antonyms for this word could be relinquish, surrender, or yield. Relinquish means to give up control, authority or possession of something. Surrender means to hand over control, power, or possession to another person or authority. Yield means to give up or hand over something under pressure, force or persuasion. These antonyms have reverse meanings to the word usurp because they all denote a willing transfer of power, control or possession to someone else, unlike usurp which is an act of doing so without permission or authority.

Usage examples for Usurp

Nay, verily, it is not right or manly for our man government thus to usurp the whole legal power of self-protection and defence, and leave confiding, trusting woman wholly at the mercy of this gigantic power.
"Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard's Trial, and Self-Defence from the Charge of Insanity"
Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard
Wait till the Murad business has all settled down, and she has seen that we are not going to usurp her land.
"One Maid's Mischief"
George Manville Fenn
And it continued to speak plain language about the Home Rule which now seemed inevitable: No scheme which the English Parliament may pass in the near future will satisfy Sinn Fein-no legislature created in Ireland which is not supreme and absolute will offer a basis for concluding a final settlement with the foreigners who usurp the government of this country.
"The Evolution of Sinn Fein"
Robert Mitchell Henry

Famous quotes with Usurp

  • If in later life she has mastered her hunger drive by ego control, she may assume that she can control her fate herself. But that ego may in fact be very weak, because it has been built by cutting herself off from the mainstream of life through severe dieting. It is built on negative rather than positive need. In a real life crisis, such an ego may fail to operate because she does not know consciously what her own needs are. [...] An ego which sets itself up against Fate is attempting to usurp the power of the Self; it swings from light to dark, from inflation to depression. Only when her ego is firmly rooted in her own feminine feeling can a woman be released from her compulsive behavior.
    Marion Woodman
  • Of greater importance than this regulation of African clientship were the political consequences of the Jugurthine war or rather of the Jugurthine insurrection, although these have been frequently estimated too highly. Certainly all the evils of the government were therein brought to light in all their nakedness; it was now not merely notorious but, so to speak, judicially established, that among the governing lords of Rome everything was treated as venal--the treaty of peace and the right of intercession, the rampart of the camp and the life of the soldier; the African had said no more than the simple truth, when on his departure from Rome he declared that, if he had only gold enough, he would undertake to buy the city itself. But the whole external and internal government of this period bore the same stamp of miserable baseness. In our case the accidental fact, that the war in Africa is brought nearer to us by means of better accounts than the other contemporary military and political events, shifts the true perspective; contemporaries learned by these revelations nothing but what everybody knew long before and every intrepid patriot had long been in a position to support by facts. The circumstance, however, that they were now furnished with some fresh, still stronger and still more irrefutable, proofs of the baseness of the restored senatorial government--a baseness only surpassed by its incapacity--might have been of importance, had there been an opposition and a public opinion with which the government would have found it necessary to come to terms. But this war had in fact exposed the corruption of the government no less than it had revealed the utter nullity of the opposition. It was not possible to govern worse than the restoration governed in the years 637-645; it was not possible to stand forth more defenceless and forlorn than was the Roman senate in 645: had there been in Rome a real opposition, that is to say, a party which wished and urged a fundamental alteration of the constitution, it must necessarily have now made at least an attempt to overturn the restored senate. No such attempt took place; the political question was converted into a personal one, the generals were changed, and one or two useless and unimportant people were banished. It was thus settled, that the so-called popular party as such neither could nor would govern; that only two forms of government were at all possible in Rome, a -tyrannis- or an oligarchy; that, so long as there happened to be nobody sufficiently well known, if not sufficiently important, to usurp the regency of the state, the worst mismanagement endangered at the most individual oligarchs, but never the oligarchy; that on the other hand, so soon as such a pretender appeared, nothing was easier than to shake the rotten curule chairs. In this respect the coming forward of Marius was significant, just because it was in itself so utterly unwarranted. If the burgesses had stormed the senate-house after the defeat of Albinus, it would have been a natural, not to say a proper course; but after the turn which Metellus had given to the Numidian war, nothing more could be said of mismanagement, and still less of danger to the commonwealth, at least in this respect; and yet the first ambitious officer who turned up succeeded in doing that with which the older Africanus had once threatened the government,(16) and procured for himself one of the principal military commands against the distinctly- expressed will of the governing body. Public opinion, unavailing in the hands of the so-called popular party, became an irresistible weapon in the hands of the future king of Rome. We do not mean to say
    Theodor Mommsen
  • None can usurp this height... But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.
    John Keats
  • This attempt to usurp the government by subverting the Constitution of the United States was the policy of the greatest leader the system of slavery has ever had in this country — that pagan of our politics, Mr. Calhoun. While other statesmen merely saw, he foresaw. His mind, of large forecast and comprehensive grasp, perceived that the logic of history, of civilization, of our national idea, of the universal conscience, was against slavery. But he had seen the conscience of the country, roused for a moment in the Missouri debate, drop asleep again. And with the audacity of genius he resolved to stun the country into acquiescence by claiming that slavery was the fundamental law of the land.
    George William Curtis
  • [Aeneas] is the symbol of Rome; and, as Aeneas is to Rome, so is ancient Rome to Europe. Thus Virgil acquires the centrality of the unique classic; he is at the centre of European civilisation, in a position which no other poet can share or usurp. The Roman Empire and the Latin language were not any empire and any language, but an empire and a language with a unique destiny in relation to ourselves, and the poet in whom that Empire and that language came to consciousness and expression is a poet of unique destiny. [...] No modern language can hope to produce a classic, in the sense in which I have called Virgil a classic. Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil.
    Virgil

Related words: subversive, usurped, seize power, seize control, seize the throne, subvert, subverted, take power

Related questions:

  • What does usurp mean?
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