adjective, noun
adjective [onlybeforenoun]
1 most important; main:
the chief cause / problem / reason * one of the President's chief rivals
2 (often Chief) highest in rank:
the Chief Education Officer * the chief financial officer of the company * Detective Chief Inspector Williams
3 (-in-chief) (in nouns) of the highest rank:
commander-in-chief
seealsoCHIEFLY
Part of speech: noun
1 a person with a high rank or the highest rank in a company or an organization:
army / industry / police chiefs
2 (often as a title) a leader or ruler of a tribe:
Chief Buthelezi * Chief Crazy Horse
IDIOMS
there are too many chiefs and not enough Indians (BrE, informal) used to describe a situation in which there are too many people telling other people what to do, and not enough people to do the work
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for chief is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is chief a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, chief is tagged as noun.
Does chief appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — chief appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
