Meaning
A wealthy, powerful businessperson, especially one with outsized influence over an industry, as in press tycoon or tech tycoon. The tone is neutral to faintly awed or wry. No ruler is implied any more; the original shogunal sense survives only in historical writing about nineteenth-century Japan. Neutral-to-wry noun for the very rich in business; pairing it with an industry is the usual pattern. Regional use: General English (borrowed from Japanese).
Origin
From Japanese taikun, 'great lord or prince', itself built on elements borrowed centuries earlier from Chinese: tai 'great' plus kun 'lord, prince'. In the mid-19th century the Tokugawa shogunate used Taikun as the diplomatic title presented to foreigners, so the shogun could deal with Western envoys without invoking his true rank, and the word reportedly reached English partly through Townsend Harris, the first American consul in Japan. Merriam-Webster and the Online Etymology Dictionary both date the English borrowing to 1857, when it meant the shogun himself. Already by 1861 it was being jocularly applied to any important person, President Lincoln included, in his secretary John Hay's diary, and after the First World War it settled on its modern target, the wealthy and powerful business magnate.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- taikun (historical romanisation)
- tycoon (archaic spelling)
- tycoonate (rare derived noun)
Usage Examples
- By the 1920s the shipping tycoon owned half the waterfront and most of the politicians who regulated it.
- She went from selling software out of a garage to being a tech tycoon with telecoms stakes on three continents.
- The documentary traces how a newspaper tycoon's empire collapsed under debt in a single decade.