Dictionary

selectman en · NOUN

Etymology

From select + -man.

Meanings

1. (US) Any of a board of municipal officers elected to manage some New England towns.
   • Near-synonyms: selectperson, selectwoman, councilperson, councilman, councilwoman
   • Every selectman in the state of New Hampshire seems to be positive that growth in a town will lower taxes, but if you plot growth rates against tax rates, you find a scatter as random as the stars in a New Hampshire winter sky. 2008, Donella H. Meadows, edited by Diana Wright, Thinking In Systems: A Primer:
   • But what villager could have foreseen that their neighbor was to be commissioner for the government of Massachusetts, church elder, town selectman, judge of small causes, and town deputy to the Massachusetts legislature? The people of Weyhill [in Hampshire, England], who had seen Peter Noyes serve as juryman in their manorial court and churchwarden of their church on the hill, could have predicted that he would do well as land surveyor, road building director, grantor of timber, and fence viewer. They would have been amazed, however, and so would Noyes himself, if someone had told him, in 1638, that during the next twenty years he was to attend one hundred and twenty-nine separate official meetings in his town, to say nothing of the informal church gatherings, church services, and sessions of the Massachusetts legislature. 1963, Sumner Chilton Powell, “Chapter I: The Web of Open-field Life”, in Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town, Wesleyan University Press:
   • The New England […] town had its own government: a group of selectmen elected by the adult male members of the church. The selectmen acted as a plural executive, while the town’s eligible voters gathered for town meetings and functioned as a miniature parliament. 2011, Colin Woodard, chapter 4, in American nations, New York: Penguin, →ISBN:

Forms

Hypernyms

person · officer · officeholder

Synonyms

councilman · selectwoman · councilperson · councilwoman · selectperson