Centurion

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /sɛnˈtjʊəɹ.i.ən/

Definitions

1. A military officer in ancient Rome who commanded a unit of approximately one hundred soldiers and served as a senior non-commissioned leader within the legions
2. A high-ranking officer commanding roughly one hundred troops in the Roman army who functioned as a crucial administrative and tactical leader within the military structure
3. An ancient Roman military commander responsible for supervising about one hundred soldiers and maintaining discipline and order among a substantial infantry unit

Etymology: The Roman centurion was not, in fact, always commanding exactly one hundred men, and the English word has a rival of its own that lost out. Before "centurion" arrived, English speakers used "hundredman" (Old English "hundredmann"), a plain, transparent name for the same officer: a man in charge of a hundred. The Latin original was "centuriō," built from "centum," meaning "a hundred," and the Latin term was already a counting word for the unit a centurion led. Its descendant "centurion" came into English through Middle English, displacing the native compound, so the English language effectively swapped a homemade label for a borrowed classical one. The Roman "centuria" was itself a unit of nominal strength, and a centurion typically led a century of men, though the real number in a Roman century often fell short of one hundred. The title stuck to the officer long after the Roman army had changed, and it is the same root that gives English words such as "century," the hundred-year span.

Synonyms: officer, commander, captain