chairman
Pronunciation: /ˈtʃɛːmən/
noun ( plural chairmen)
- 1a person chosen to preside over a meeting: the chairman of the conference
- the permanent or long-term president of a committee, company, or other organization: he was chairman of the finance committee he received an offer to become the company’s chairman and chief executive
- (Chairman) (since 1949) the leading figure in the Chinese Communist Party.
The word chairman found itself accused of sexism in the 1970s, with critics opposed to the way it combined the notion of power with a grammatical gender bias. Two neutral alternatives were proposed, chair (which was actually recorded in this sense in the 17th century) and the neologism chairperson. Both terms faced initial resistance, and although they have now become accepted in standard English, the Oxford English Corpus shows that they are still far less common than chairman.