ascendancy

English edit

Alternative forms edit

ascendency

Etymology edit

ascend +‎ -ancy or ascendant +‎ -cy. The use in ecology is due to Robert Ulanowicz.

Pronunciation edit

IPA^(key): /əˈsɛndənsi/

Noun edit

ascendancy (countable and uncountable, plural ascendancies)

The quality of being in the ascendant; dominant control, supremacy.
Synonyms: ascendant, superiority
- 2011 January 15, Phil McNulty, “Tottenham 0 - 0 Man Utd”, in BBC‎^[1]:
  Spurs ended the half in the ascendancy and Van der Vaart was again inches away from giving them the lead when he met Bale's cross but his header flew wide.
- 2018 July 18, Owen Jones, “The hard right can only be defeated from the left, not from the centre”, in The Guardian‎^[2]:
  The Tory hard right is in the ascendancy, and a fascist street movement – led by convicted fraudster Tommy Robinson – represents a growing threat.
(historical, Ireland, sometimes capitalized) Ellipsis of Protestant Ascendancy, a class of Protestant landowners and professionals that dominated political and social life in Ireland up to the early 20th century.
- 1975, Terry Eagleton, New Left Review:
  [W. B. Yeats] belonged not to the ascendancy class but to the protestant bourgeoisie.
- 2017, John Gibney, “The Age of O'Connell”, in A Short History of Ireland, 1500–2000, New Haven: Yale University Press, →ISBN:
  True, the “ascendancy” remained a crucial and significant governing class in Irish life, and would remain so for generations.
(ecology) A quantitative attribute of an ecosystem, defined as a function of the ecosystem's trophic network, and intended to indicate its ability to prevail against disturbance by virtue of its combined organization and size. [from 1986]
- 2009, Sven Erik Jørgensen, editor, Ecosystem Ecology, Academic Press, →ISBN, page 63:
  Ascendency was found to be a useful indicator for the health assessment of marine benthic ecosystems over space and time.