1. Word finder
  2. Word definitions
  3. hierarchy

Find the word definition

What is "hierarchy"

Crossword clues for hierarchy

hierarchy
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
hierarchy
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
administrative
▪ For a short time, Simeon kept the Nazarean administrative hierarchy in Jerusalem.
▪ And these rules may, of course, be enforced by an administrative hierarchy to which the subject may appeal.
▪ These presupposed not only honest and well-educated people, but an administrative hierarchy, managers, and a system of checks.
catholic
▪ Heavily backed by the Catholic hierarchy, it had an agenda of combating Mafia crime.
▪ Levada was a rising and ambitious figure within the conservative ranks of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
▪ From the Roman catholic hierarchy, he solicited the response that the church believed in the indissolubility of marriage.
▪ The Catholic hierarchy was joined at the prayer vigil by the Rev.
▪ Imprisonment -. condemned by the Catholic hierarchy from the pulpit.
▪ The people of Holy Trinity espouse similar values in the face of an unpersuaded Catholic hierarchy.
▪ Ostentatiously non-sectarian, Larkin was invariably opposed by the Catholic hierarchy on social issues.
ecclesiastical
▪ Some idea of status has to be obtained, therefore, if the local ecclesiastical hierarchy is to be understood.
▪ There were no official mediators, licensed by an ecclesiastical hierarchy or set apart by apostolic ordination.
▪ Belliustin called upon the tsar to circumvent the ecclesiastical hierarchy and breathe life into the clerical estate.
local
▪ Some idea of status has to be obtained, therefore, if the local ecclesiastical hierarchy is to be understood.
▪ He can afford to argue with the local hierarchy when the interests of his order require it.
managerial
▪ Given the power of the managerial hierarchy to dispense or withhold rewards, open acts of defiance expose individuals to reprisal.
▪ It had two primary characteristics: multiple operating units and managerial hierarchies.
▪ Both reasons for fragmenting work imply the creation of a managerial hierarchy to co-ordinate and control the various fragmented jobs.
▪ As an organizational system, managerial hierarchy has never been adequately described and has just as certainly never been adequately used.
▪ What we need is managerial hierarchy that understands its own nature and purpose.
▪ And, if they do, how should their organisational structure be incorporated into the managerial hierarchy of the hospital?
▪ The problem is that our managerial hierarchies are so badly designed as to defeat the best efforts even of psychologically insightful individuals.
old
▪ But as the old hierarchies are swept away, some managers are demoted and many others see their natural promotion paths disappear.
▪ I go into meetings now and the old hierarchy is flattened.
▪ The anytime / anyplace business world leaves those whose position in the old hierarchy gave them status and power upset and uneasy.
rigid
▪ In place of the rigid bureaucracies and hierarchies of many traditional companies Peters and Waterman found less conventional and more dynamic organisational forms.
▪ We needed flexibility, but kept rigid hierarchies.
▪ Many communities of small cetaceans have rigid hierarchies of power.
▪ For decades rigid party hierarchy determined political fortunes.
▪ Such disparities predated the imposition of a rigid social hierarchy, but became more marked during the course of the Tokugawa period.
▪ In Workplace 2000, rigid hierarchies will be dismantled, as will the ceremonial trappings of power.
▪ Its supporters make the point that it breaks down rigid hierarchies and allows for greater participation in the decision-making process.
roman
▪ From the Roman catholic hierarchy, he solicited the response that the church believed in the indissolubility of marriage.
▪ Levada was a rising and ambitious figure within the conservative ranks of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
▪ A son who might rise in the Roman priestly hierarchy was essential to family and dynastic interests.
social
▪ What is its place in the social hierarchy of knowledge? 2.
▪ When children are segregated by ability groups, a social hierarchy develops.
▪ An official orthodoxy based on Neo-Confucian doctrines emphasized the preservation of order and maintenance of social hierarchy.
▪ Both are born into colonial societies ordered by traditional social systems of hierarchy and male domination and by strong, fundamentalist religion.
▪ These quite explicitly linked vocational education with the low status black people were expected to occupy in the social hierarchy.
▪ In the social hierarchy, these lords of big business were the equivalent of the daimyos of the past with their clans.
▪ This unequal but in general legitimated social hierarchy had depended on a healthy capitalist economy and benign, prosperous welfare State.
▪ In sum, conservatism attempts to prevent or slow the transition away from a society based on traditional values and social hierarchy.
strict
▪ Figure 2.2 reflects an organisation without a strict hierarchy where everyone is working quite independently.
▪ Operation Rescue was an organization with a strict hierarchy of command.
▪ In the strict hierarchy of the Catalan countryside these peasant farmer families almost ranked as a petty nobility.
▪ There seemed to be a strict hierarchy of beauty and desirability.
▪ Forward-thinking organisations have restructured themselves so that adherence to strict hierarchy and title is less significant.
▪ Even among the whites in a single grade there was a strict sense of hierarchy.
traditional
▪ Some were outright extensions of traditional hierarchies, while others were predominantly recruited from the new plutocracy and professions.
▪ The traditional hierarchy will have only a local, limited, internal role.
■ NOUN
church
▪ These country people did not love bishops, the paraphernalia of church hierarchy.
▪ This decision split the vehemently antiabortion Church hierarchy from its liberal allies.
▪ They are, for a start, a product of the local community, not the church hierarchy.
▪ In the South, the church hierarchy pursued the path of full cultural control.
▪ But the official church hierarchy strongly disapproved.
▪ Between 60 and 70 percent of Salisbury's clergy wives now work, and the church hierarchy encourages them to.
▪ In contrast we find the Church party attacking the Church hierarchy.
class
▪ Each of the objects in our little class hierarchy is also an instance of the Thing class.
▪ Their consumer goods are yearned for throughout the class hierarchy.
▪ The difference in the relative mortality of the extremes of the class hierarchy decrease with age.
▪ The class hierarchy is alive and well in the gradations through the 250 different decorations which the Crown awards.
▪ This is the object-oriented concept of inheritance, that is, characteristics received from an ancestor in a class hierarchy.
status
▪ The breakdown in inhibitions may be moving up the status hierarchy in higher education.
■ VERB
arrange
▪ Society was arranged in a dual hierarchy, of laymen and clergy.
▪ But he delved deeper and discovered that the thirteen genders were arranged in a hierarchy.
▪ The second premise is that human needs are arranged in a hierarchy of importance.
based
▪ In essence, internal relations previously based on hierarchies and bureaucratic authority are being gradually transformed into actual or surrogate market transactions.
▪ It acknowledged color differences but based no hierarchy on them.
▪ This results from its special form of organization, a system of relations based on hierarchy, specialization and co-ordination.
▪ Scheler's phenomenology was based on a metaphysical hierarchy of values orienting the human being.
▪ This is in contrast to the traditional structure based upon professional hierarchies.
▪ We are developing a holistic model of nursing care directly based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
▪ The social system is based on a hierarchy within which the most dominant individuals take the greatest share of food.
▪ It remains a conservative model, based upon control and hierarchy.
create
▪ Browsers create windows in a hierarchy which starts with a page in the original browser window.
▪ You just create a new hierarchy and reset the thermostat.
▪ The draftsman did not make the crimes formerly contained in those statutes consistent or create a hierarchy of offences.
▪ The range of connectance created a hierarchy.
▪ It is possible to express many-to-many relationships using the hierarchical model, but only by creating two hierarchies.
▪ In the next project, I have created a small hierarchy of related classes.
▪ The effect of this is to create a hierarchy of norms with conformity with the obligations of the Charter at the top.
▪ These two factors act together to create and reproduce social hierarchy.
establish
▪ The dazzle effect of grids can be subdued by establishing a hierarchy of one set of parallels over another.
▪ Thus the recognition of values helps health practitioners establish priorities and hierarchies of importance among needs and goals.
flatten
▪ It was hypothesized here that the flattening of the hierarchy was apparent, but this did not automatically democratize.
▪ Hence participatory organizations find that they must eliminate layers and flatten their hierarchies.
▪ At the same time our study found that although the flattening of the hierarchy was apparent, that did not automatically democratize.
▪ Companies are flattening management hierarchies and erasing the operational separation between managers and workers.
form
▪ If there are many males and females in the group, the males form a separate hierarchy above that of the females.
▪ Living beings comprise a whole sequence of levels forming such a hierarchy.
▪ Linguistic units tend to form a hierarchy of extent.
▪ The grammatical structure of the sentence is thus a series of nested constructions forming a hierarchy.
move
▪ As we move up the hierarchy towards elite sport, there is an increasing demand to watch sporting competitions.
▪ The breakdown in inhibitions may be moving up the status hierarchy in higher education.
▪ Each group becomes more inclusive the further we move up the hierarchy.
▪ Mortality rates among the adult working population parallel the progressive incidence of illness that occurs as one moves down the social hierarchy.
▪ As officials move up the hierarchy they may be more involved in policy advice rather than managing budgets or people.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
▪ Genotti was thought to be number two in the Sicilian Mafia hierarchy.
▪ Smith has the backing of the Republican hierarchy.
▪ Tatawi worked her way up through the corporate hierarchy to become President.
▪ The caste system categorized Hindus into a social hierarchy.
▪ The school district reorganized the administrative hierarchy, which helped to save money.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ A good conceptual clusterer is one which finds a succinct meaningful hierarchy of succinct definitions of meaningful concepts.
▪ Figure 2.2 reflects an organisation without a strict hierarchy where everyone is working quite independently.
▪ Formal organisations have an explicit hierarchy in a well- defined structure; job specifications and communication channels are also well-defined.
▪ In the human management of distributed control, hierarchies of a certain type will proliferate rather than diminish.
▪ In the social hierarchy, these lords of big business were the equivalent of the daimyos of the past with their clans.
▪ Linguistic units tend to form a hierarchy of extent.
▪ The dominance hierarchies of primates are often more complex, overlapping networks, rather than the simple ladder of the hen hierarchy.
▪ You just create a new hierarchy and reset the thermostat.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Hierarchy

Hierarchy \Hi"er*arch`y\ (h[imac]"[~e]r*[aum]rk`[y^]), n.; pl. Hierarchies (h[imac]"[~e]r*[aum]rk`[i^]z). [Gr. 'ierarchi`a: cf. F. hi['e]rarchie.]

  1. Dominion or authority in sacred things.

  2. A body of officials disposed organically in ranks and orders each subordinate to the one above it; a body of ecclesiastical rulers.

  3. A form of government administered in the church by patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops, bishops, and, in an inferior degree, by priests.
    --Shipley.

  4. A rank or order of holy beings.

    Standards and gonfalons . . . for distinction serve Of hierarchies, of orders, and degrees.
    --Milton.

  5. (Math., Logic, Computers) Any group of objects ranked so that every one but the topmost is subordinate to a specified one above it; also, the entire set of ordering relations between such objects. The ordering relation between each object and the one above is called a hierarchical relation.

    Note: Classification schemes, as in biology, usually form hierarchies.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
hierarchy

mid-14c., from Old French ierarchie, from Medieval Latin hierarchia "ranked division of angels" (in the system of Dionysius the Areopagite), from Greek hierarkhia "rule of a high priest," from hierarkhes "high priest, leader of sacred rites," from ta hiera "the sacred rites" (neuter plural of hieros "sacred;" see ire) + arkhein "to lead, rule" (see archon). Sense of "ranked organization of persons or things" first recorded 1610s, initially of clergy, sense probably influenced by higher. Related: Hierarchal; hierarchical.

Wiktionary
hierarchy

n. A body of authoritative officials organized in nested ranks.

Related phrases:
WordNet
hierarchy

  1. n. a series of ordered groupings of people or things within a system; "put honesty first in her hierarchy of values"

  2. the organization of people at different ranks in an administrative body [syn: power structure, pecking order]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Hierarchy

A hierarchy (from the Greek ἱεραρχία hierarchia, "rule of a high priest", from ἱεράρχης hierarkhes, "leader of sacred rites") is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) in which the items are represented as being "above," "below," or "at the same level as" one another.

A hierarchy can link entities either directly or indirectly, and either vertically or diagonally. The only direct links in a hierarchy, insofar as they are hierarchical, are to one's immediate superior or to one of one's subordinates, although a system that is largely hierarchical can also incorporate alternative hierarchies. Indirect hierarchical links can extend "vertically" upwards or downwards via multiple links in the same direction, following a path. All parts of the hierarchy which are not linked vertically to one another nevertheless can be "horizontally" linked through a path by traveling up the hierarchy to find a common direct or indirect superior, and then down again. This is akin to two co-workers or colleagues; each reports to a common superior, but they have the same relative amount of authority. Organizational forms exist that are both alternative and complementary to hierarchy. Heterarchy is one such form.

Hierarchy (disambiguation)

A hierarchy is an arrangement of units into related levels of different weights or ranks, meaning that levels are considered "higher" or "lower" than one another. The term, which originally meant rule by priests, is now generalised and describes systems with a linear concept of subordinates and superiors and where each level has only 1 direct parent level. Hierarchies are typically depicted as a tree structures.

Hierarchy may also refer to:

  • Hierarchy (mathematics), the mathematical model of a hierarchical structure as an ordered set
    • Containment hierarchy, a hierarchy of only strictly nested sets
  • Hierarchy (object-oriented programming), also known as inheritance, the creation of new classes from existing classes
  • Hierarchical database model, a tree-like database model
    • Hierarchical query, an SQL query on a hierarchical database
  • Hierarchical linear modeling, multi-level statistical analysis and linear regression
  • Hierarchical organization, the structure of most organizations, including governments, businesses and organized religions
    • Catholic Church hierarchy
  • Hierarchical network, the hierarchical of computer network components
  • Hierarchical control system, a layered model for component organization in software and robotics
  • Dominance hierarchy, an intraspecific ordering of individuals or groups by power status and dominance
    • Social hierarchy, the concept as applied to humans
  • Memory hierarchy, the hierarchical organization of computer storage for analysis of performance issues
  • Hierarchy of life, the biological organisation of all life from the atomic level to the biosphere
  • Hierarchy of genres, any formalization that ranks different types of art genres in an art-form in terms of their value
  • Hierarchy of values, an ordered list of social values in US law
  • Hierarchy, an alien race in the Universe at War video game series
Hierarchy (mathematics)

In mathematics, a hierarchy is a set-theoretical object, consisting of a preorder defined on a set. This is often referred to as an ordered set, though that is an ambiguous term, which many authors reserve for partially ordered sets or totally ordered sets. The term pre-ordered set is unambiguous, and is always synonymous with a mathematical hierarchy. The term hierarchy is used to stress a hierarchical relation among the elements.

Sometimes, a set comes equipped with a natural hierarchical structure. For example, the set of natural numbers N is equipped with a natural pre-order structure, where n ≤ nʹ whenever we can find some other number m so that n + m = nʹ. That is, nʹ is bigger than n only because we can get to nʹ from n using m. This is true for any commutative monoid. On the other hand, the set of integers Z requires a more sophisticated argument for its hierarchical structure, since we can always solve the equation n + m = nʹ by writing m = (nʹ − n).

A mathematical hierarchy (a pre-ordered set) should not be confused with the more general concept of a hierarchy in the social realm, particularly when one is constructing computational models which are used to describe real-world social, economic or political systems. These hierarchies, or complex networks, are much too rich to be described in the category Set of sets. This is not just a pedantic claim; there are also mathematical hierarchies which are not describable using set theory.

Another natural hierarchy arises in computer science, where the word refers to partially ordered sets whose elements are classes of objects of increasing complexity. In that case, the preorder defining the hierarchy is the class-containment relation. Containment hierarchies are thus special cases of hierarchies.

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "hierarchy".

Corporate structure information such as organization charts, hierarchy charts, employee or departmental lists, reporting structure, names, positions, internal contact numbers, employee numbers, or similar information that is used for internal processes should not be made available on publicly accessible Web sites.

He was aware that he employer, Stanley Broder, represented a splinter faction of the Tandesko hierarchy and not the main quorum.

Hir was aware that hir employer, Stanley Broder, represented a splinter faction of the Tandesko hierarchy and not the main quorum.

He had budded into a happy family, spent his childhood in a friendly and peaceful society, lapped in the warmth of a general approval, a society filled with immutable hierarchies that tucked every hatchling and every budling into a niche it would never quite break out of no matter what it did or felt, but also a society that accepted it without reservations, that cherished it and tolerated its rebellions, its idiosyncrasies.

Too remorseless for the Spirit of the Waters, too bloodthirsty for the hierarchy of progressive victims, the last Ceratosaurus roamed the thick-leaved jungles in a vain search for the food which could satisfy his gnashing jaws: then died and slept with his fathers.

Moreover, cryptography still functions through a hierarchy and employs a multitude of special systems.

It was a feudalistic disaster, product of the usual fears of a mentally sick hierarchy, uncreative, and so completely suppressive that the genius of half the people of earth had already been lost for two hundred years.

It is quite right that there should be one clergyman to every parish interpreting the Scriptures after a particular manner, ruled by a regular hierarchy, and paid with a rich proportion of haycocks and wheatsheafs.

With much righteous indignation, they hierarchically denounce hierarchy.

The pounding of the tribes, like corn between the grinding stones of the imp is Once Inkunzi had proved his worth and established his place high in the hierarchy of the band, he joined quite naturally in the indabas around the campfire.

Chuck and I knew we had created a monster and felt real good about it, but Chuck pointed out that it was sort of like watching your mother-in-law drive your new Cadillac off a cliff, because we knew that Jo would not go fuck herself but would go talk to the Fish, who would go talk to the Leggo, who would get us back but good, since the essence of any hierarchy is retaliation.

From the Leggo to the Bruiser, no one in the hierarchy could understand how the nursing-home beds seemed to open at a touch for ward 6-South, and only for ward 6-South.

The affirmation of hybridities and the free play of differences across boundaries, however, is liberatory only in a context where power poses hierarchy exclusively though essential identities, binary divisions, and stable oppositions.

In our present imperial world, the liberatory potential of the postmodernist and postcolonial discourses that we have described only resonates with the situation of an elite population that enjoys certain rights, a certain level of wealth, and a certain position in the global hierarchy.

And, of course, it had the additional effect of tying him in tighter to the political hierarchy of the system, identifying him even more strongly with the ruling structures and individuals, giving him more of an incentive to fight to preserve Mercatorial rule.