The state that exists when one person or group has power over another

Usage examples of ascendancy.

His hatred, like a powerless though furious wave, was broken against the strong ascendancy which Mercedes exercised over him.

Morrel, subdued by the extraordinary ascendancy Monte Cristo exercised over everything around him, did not endeavor to resist it.

Her ascendancy over the King was attributed to the enchantments and experiments of a Dominican friar, learned in many a cantrip and cabala, whom she entertained in her house, and who had fashioned two pictures of Edward and Alive which, when suffumigated with the incense of mysterious herbs and gums, mandrakes, sweet calamus, caryophylleae, storax, benzoin, and other plants plucked beneath the full moon what time Venus was in ascendant, caused the old King to dote upon this lovely concubine.

He thought of burning the incriminating letters, destroying them and proof of his culpability forever, but he also knew that as long as he possessed them they gave him powerful ascendancy over Andrew.

She was absolutely everywhere on both sides of the building, had established ascendancy over Licinia effortlessly and painlessly, made herself liked by all six Vestals, and would soon be, her son thought with silent laughter, absorbed in improving the efficiency not only of the Domus Publica, but also of its testamentary industry.

It was now for more than the middle span of our allotted years that he had passed through the thousand vicissitudes of existence and, being of a wary ascendancy and self a man of rare forecast, he had enjoined his heart to repress all motions of a rising choler and, by intercepting them with the readiest precaution, foster within his breast that plenitude of sufferance which base minds jeer at, rash judgers scorn and all find tolerable and but tolerable.

And the message is clear: their argument, their war is with the Mercatorial system, with the Ascendancy and the Omnocracy and the Administrata and not with the common people, not with us.

This theme attracted the sympathy of liberals everywhere, especially in the political context of a powerful conservative ascendancy in Western Europe and in the cultural context of philhellenic ideologies that had entered widely into European classicism and Romanticism.

These resented the ascendancy of the women, and grumbled about them or made vulgar jokes, and in their turn the women considered them weaklings or slackers and held them in ill-disguised contempt.

I am lodged in the old Dutch Stadthaus, formerly the residence of the Dutch Governor, and which has enough of solitude and faded stateliness to be fearsome, or at the least eerie, to a solitary guest like myself, to whose imagination, in the long, dark nights, creeping Malays or pilfering Chinamen are far more likely to present themselves than the stiff beauties and formal splendors of the heyday of Dutch ascendancy.

They were supported by local Jacobin militants who had either been harassed during the federalist ascendancy or who simply enjoyed showing off their anticlerical zeal.

It was ancient custom, and it served well to keep five ambitious men from battling each other for ascendancy.

After things began to settle into shape at Millen, they seemed to believe that they were in such ascendancy as to numbers and organization that they could put into execution their schemes of vengeance against those of us who had been active participants in the execution of their confederates at Andersonville.

It was rendered so by the character of the debates both on home and foreign questions, by the rivalry of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, for the leadership of the whig party, the changes of ministry, and the last effort of the tory and protectionist party to gain ascendancy.

Louis scourged to exile the remnant of wastrels and gallants that had demoralized his court and settled down to a monastic quiet in which the trivium and the quadrivium resumed their proper ascendancy over romance and gasconnade.