The position, rank, or period of rule of an autocrat; the system of government under an autocrat.
From autocrat + -ship (a suffix meaning state, condition, or office). The -ship suffix comes from Old English and was productively used to create nouns describing positions of authority like kingship, presidency, and leadership.
The -ship suffix is a remarkable pattern in English—it transforms any role into an abstraction of that role's condition, which is why we can talk about 'friendship' (the state of being friends) and 'autocratship' (the state of being an autocrat) with the same mechanism.
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