majority

Noun

1. More than half (50%) of some group.
   • The majority agreed that the new proposal was the best.
   • Those opposing the building plans were in the majority, so the building project was canceled.
   • The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed; and if no person have such majority, then from the persons...

   Antonyms: minority

   Coordinate Terms: plurality

2. In a parliament or legislature, the difference in seats between the ruling party and the opposition; (UK) in an election, the difference in votes between the winning candidate and the second-place candidate, or between the winning candidate and all of the other candidates combined.
   • The ruling party had a narrow three-seat majority in the legislature.
   • The winner with 53% had a 6% majority over the loser with 47%.
   • Now, there is talk of Democrats potentially being locked out of a Senate majority for a time to come because of trends in the electorate. […] This shouldn’t be surprising. As political analyst Sean Trende posited in the...
3. Legal adulthood, age of majority.
   • By the time I reached my majority, I had already been around the world twice.
4. The office held by a member of the armed forces in the rank of major.
   • On receiving the news of his promotion, Charles Snodgrass said he was delighted to be entering his majority.
   • He was a captain before he went to the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command of the divisional machine-guns. - 1925, F[rancis] Scott Fitzgerald, chapter 8, in The Great Gatsby, New...
5. Ancestors; ancestry.
   • Of evil parents an evil generation, a posterity not unlike their majority; of mischievous progenitors, a venomous and destructive progeny. - 1650, Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica: […], 2nd edition, London: […]...