Hierarchy

The word was coined as an abstract noun by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, an anonymous Christian theologian writing around 500 CE. In De Coelesti Hierarchia, he built the Greek hierarchia — from hieros (sacred) and archē (rule) — to describe a ranked order of angels in three tiers. For centuries the word stayed theological. Only in the 14th century did "hierarchy" begin to describe social and political rank, and by the 1610s the broader sense of any graded system had entered English.