Privilege vs Authority - What's the difference?
privilege | authority |
A peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor; a right or immunity not enjoyed by others or by all; special enjoyment of a good, or exemption from an evil or burden; a prerogative; advantage; franchise; preferential treatment.
The status or existence of such benefit or advantage.
(legal) A common law doctrine that protects certain communications from being used as evidence in court.
(finance) A call, put, spread, or other option.
(computing) An ability to perform an action on the system that can be selectively granted or denied to users; permission.
(archaic) To grant some particular right or exemption to; to invest with a peculiar right or immunity; to authorize; as, to privilege representatives from arrest.
(archaic) To bring or put into a condition of privilege or exemption from evil or danger; to exempt; to deliver.
(label) The power to enforce rules or give orders.
* 1883 , (Howard Pyle), (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood)
(label) Persons in command; specifically, government.
*{{quote-book, year=1927, author=
, chapter=4, title= * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-10, volume=408, issue=8848, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= (label) A person accepted as a source of reliable information on a subject.
* 1930 September 18, Albert Einstein, as quoted in Albert Einstein: Creator and Rebel (1988) by Banesh Hoffman
As nouns the difference between privilege and authority
is that privilege is a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor; a right or immunity not enjoyed by others or by all; special enjoyment of a good, or exemption from an evil or burden; a prerogative; advantage; franchise; preferential treatment while authority is the power to enforce rules or give orders.As a verb privilege
is to grant some particular right or exemption to; to invest with a peculiar right or immunity; to authorize; as, to privilege representatives from arrest.privilege
Alternative forms
* priviledg (obsolete) * priviledge (obsolete)Noun
(en noun)- All first-year professors here must teach four courses a term, yet you're only teaching one! What entitled you to such a privilege ?
- In order to advance racial equality in the United States, what we've got to do is reduce white privilege .
- ''Your honor, my client is not required to answer that; her response is protected by attorney-client privilege .
Synonyms
* prerogative, immunity, freelage, franchise, right, claim, liberty, advantage, foredealDerived terms
* cisprivilegeVerb
(privileg)authority
English
Alternative forms
* authourity (obsolete)Noun
- But in the meantime Robin Hood and his band lived quietly in Sherwood Forest, without showing their faces abroad, for Robin knew that it would not be wise for him to be seen in the neighborhood of Nottingham, those in authority being very wroth with him.
F. E. Penny
Pulling the Strings, passage=The case was that of a murder. It had an element of mystery about it, however, which was puzzling the authorities . A turban and loincloth soaked in blood had been found; also a staff.}}
Legal highs: A new prescription, passage=No sooner has a [synthetic] drug been blacklisted than chemists adjust their recipe and start churning out a subtly different one. These “legal highs” are sold for the few months it takes the authorities to identify and ban them, and then the cycle begins again.}}
- To punish me for my contempt of authority', Fate has made me an ' authority myself.