- 1
An interregnum is the stretch of time when the top seat is empty and people are waiting for the next ruler or leader. Historians first used it for kings and queens: the old monarch is gone, the new one has not taken the throne yet, and the country goes on in that in-between. The same picture is now used for a government, a party, a company, or even a club with no chief. The organisation is not finished; it is paused at the top. It is a formal, Latin-sounding word. You meet it in history, political news, and careful writing. At the dinner table people almost never say it; they say the gap, or until we get someone new. Though actually, speakers also stretch it to any pause between two periods of control, which is looser than the old no-king meaning, but that looser use is real. There is a learned plural, interregna, still seen in scholarly prose; interregnums is also used.
空位期、政權空窗期
原始詞典資料6 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
interregnumnoun/ɪntəˈɹɛɡnəm/
- 1
A period of time between the end of one monarch's reign and the accession of their successor.
- The Sasanian Interregnum of 628–632
- It was not till the kings had been shorn of power and the interregnum of sham democracy had set in, leaving no virile force in the state or the world to resist the money power, that the opportunity for a world-wide plutocratic despotism arrived.
- 2
A break in continuity; a gap, an intermission.
- Is it not Pelham who wonders what becomes of servants when they are not wanted;—whether, like the tones of an instrument, they exist but when called for? About servants we will not decide; but that some such interregnum certainly occurs in female existence on rising from table, no one can doubt who ever noted the sound of the dining and the silence of the drawing-room.
- This was in that strange pause of the storm which is its most remarkable feature in the South—that singular interregnum of the winds, when, after giving repeated notice of their most terrific action, they seem almost to forget their purpose, and for a few moments appear to slumber in their inactivity.
- 3
ChristianityA period of time between when a minister or pastor leaves a church and when a new one is installed.
- 4
governmentpoliticsA period of time between the end of one political leader's term and the start of the term of their successor; a period of time during which normal executive leadership is interrupted or suspended, and a polity is either left without leadership or has only a temporary one.
- Darker questions still emerge in these dusky final weeks of our interregnum.
- 5
obsoleteA temporary exercise of authority or rule during a period of time when there is no monarch or political leader.
這個拼法也被記錄為下列字的變化形：
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。