No matter how powerful, dictators have always needed subordinates—censors, propagandists, security guards, police officers, intelligence analysts, and local bureaucrats—to carry out their orders.
—
Seva Gunitsky,
Foreign Affairs,
1 Oct. 2026
Investigators have accused one of his subordinates of running a fraud scheme, though Kravchenko himself has not been charged or named a suspect.
Banks paid millions of dollars by today’s standards to bring along a botanist, artists, servants, his greyhound and scientific equipment.
—
Saar Shahar,
The Conversation,
12 Oct. 2026
The remains of these servants, or retainers, were first excavated from the funerary complexes at Abydos, eastern Egypt, which date from around 3000 BC, in the 1920s.
ElevenLabs established itself as one of the most highly valued of those startups this month with a $300 million employee tender, at a $22 billion price tag.
—
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson,
semafor.com,
16 Oct. 2026
Some carts were stacked high with metal steamers, while others held vats of boiling water to blanch tender stalks of gai lan.
Ellison is said to be a boss who is loyal to his underlings, particularly with his own hires.
—
Michael Schneider,
Variety,
30 Sep. 2026
Later, Bianco directed his underlings to begin counting those ballots by hand — a potential felony under state law, which forbids anyone other than election officials from so much as touching a ballot container.
There was a procession to the church of white clad handmaidens (tärnor), star boys (stjärngossar) and gingerbread men (pepparkaksgubbar) with candle wreaths on the maidens’ heads – now battery powered rather than actual flames.
—
Natasha Langan,
TheWeek,
29 Sep. 2026
Did Penelope, Helen of Troy, Athena, Calypso, and the rest of the Greek gals and goddesses deserve to be more epic than the attractive but flattened handmaidens even IMAX couldn’t enhance?
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to
show current usage.Read More
Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.
Send us feedback.