paternalism
C1CEFR level
60/100Rarity: rare
TechnicalRegister
Medicine noun
The practice of restricting a patient's freedom for their supposed own good, overriding their own preferences.
Insisting she accept the treatment 'for her own good' risks slipping into paternalism.
Business noun
The practice of managing people in a fatherly way that limits their freedom in their supposed interest.
The founder's paternalism felt reassuring at fifty staff but grew stifling once the company passed a thousand.
Rarity runs from 0 (a word everyone knows) to 100 (almost never seen outside specialist or literary writing). Level is the word's real difficulty on the CEFR scale, from A1 to C2.
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