ALLEGIANCE

Pronunciation (US):

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IPA (US):

 Dictionary entry overview: What does allegiance mean? 

• ALLEGIANCE (noun)
  The noun ALLEGIANCE has 2 senses:

1. the act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a course of action

2. the loyalty that citizens owe to their country (or subjects to their sovereign)

  Familiarity information: ALLEGIANCE used as a noun is rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ALLEGIANCE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

The act of binding yourself (intellectually or emotionally) to a course of action

Classified under:

Nouns denoting acts or actions

Synonyms:

allegiance; commitment; dedication; loyalty

Context example:

they felt no loyalty to a losing team

Hypernyms ("allegiance" is a kind of...):

cooperation (joint operation or action)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "allegiance"):

communalism (loyalty and commitment to the interests of your own minority or ethnic group rather than to society as a whole)

consecration (a solemn commitment of your life or your time to some cherished purpose (to a service or a goal))

devotion (commitment to some purpose)

enlistment (the act of enlisting (as in a military service))

faith (loyalty or allegiance to a cause or a person)

Derivation:

allegiant (steadfast in devotion (especially to your lawful monarch or government))

Sense 2

Meaning:

The loyalty that citizens owe to their country (or subjects to their sovereign)

Classified under:

Nouns denoting attributes of people and objects

Synonyms:

allegiance; fealty

Hypernyms ("allegiance" is a kind of...):

loyalty; trueness (the quality of being loyal)

Derivation:

allegiant (steadfast in devotion (especially to your lawful monarch or government))

 Context examples 

But the other animals—the squirrels, and quail, and cottontails, were creatures of the Wild who had never yielded allegiance to man.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Persons who are not U.S. citizens but who owe permanent allegiance to the U.S. They originate from places under U.S. sovereignty, jurisdiction, or administration, i.e. American Samoa, Swains Island.

(Non-Citizen National, NCI Thesaurus)

“What manner of talk is this? You speak as though the allegiance of our people were a thing which might be thrown off or on like a falcon's jessel.”

(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

I cannot accept on His behalf a divided allegiance: it must be entire.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Ethnicity - an arbitrary classification of the social group a person belongs to, and either identifies with or is identified with by others, as a result of a complex of cultural, biological, geographical and other factors such as linguistic, dietary and religion traditions; ancestry, background, allegiance, or association; and physical characteristics traditionally associated with race.

(Ethnicity, NCI Thesaurus)

He owed no allegiance to this strange and terrible god.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

I had given in allegiance to duty and order; I was quiet; I believed I was content: to the eyes of others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

His allegiance to man seemed somehow a law of his being greater than the love of liberty, of kind and kin.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

As his mother, Kiche, had rendered her allegiance to them at the first cry of her name, so he was beginning to render his allegiance.

(White Fang, by Jack London)

Besides, Kiche was well-nigh forgotten; and the chief outlet of expression that remained to him was in the allegiance he tendered the gods he had accepted as masters.

(White Fang, by Jack London)