What’s a doyen?

Word count: 305 words

Reading time: Just over 1 minute

Building your vocabulary is always a good idea. It benefits your reading and it also helps you be more specific and precise in your writing. Here is my word of the week, doyen.

The vocabulary used in the magazine The New Yorker does not typically send me scurrying for a dictionary. But that fact says less about the magazine’s writing, which is always sophisticated, and more about my inherent laziness. I’m well read enough to be vaguely familiar with a great many words, and I can slide by with a limited understanding of most of the words the magazine uses. The May 28/12 issue illustrates this point with an interesting article headlined “Easy Writers” by Arthur Krystal. Here is the sentence containing the word in question:

The doyen of thriller writers, however, continues to be the Detroit-based novelist Elmore Leonard. 

I had always thought of doyen as a term referring to an older, somewhat bossy woman, along the lines of Lady Bracknell in the Oscar Wilde play The Importance of Being Earnest. Technically speaking, that would be a doyenne and the word is actually more nuanced than I’d remembered. In fact, male or female, it refers to a senior member of any group, class or profession and not just senior by age but also by rank or experience. Thus, even a kindergarten class could have a doyen (or doyenne)!

The word dates back to the early 15th century and is Middle French, from doyen, meaning “commander of 10.” If there are any etymologists or military types reading this blog, I would love to know why 10 is considered a significant number in this case. My research wouldn’t reveal this point.

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